Section 2 - Article One |
Constructing a Bifurcated World |
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By the early 1990s, however, the fall of the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites created a political vacuum in the United States. Decades of piety towards anti-Communist sentiment had changed the nature of politics as well as American culture at large. In spite of relentlessly reiterated rhetoric of “the land of the free” and prided Constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, the influences of anti-Communism had forced either censorship or self-censorship upon news outlets, the cultural industry and individuals to watch what they say. Everyone needed to show support for American ideals and not the enemy’s. The triumph of capitalism was short-lived as many of the United States’ leaders realized the foundation which their political power had been constructed atop was crumbling beneath their feet. A new bogeyman needed to replace the USSR and its infectious Communism for those employing fear as a primary persuader of popular opinion. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, American politics and culture found itself shaped as much by ideas of what it certainly was not, as by what it was. Concepts of what truly is American or truly un-American remain as vast and varied as the lands and people inside U.S. borders. However, the lurking of an intangible, evil, outside force permeated U.S. views so deeply in the cultural and political realms during the Cold War that it lent strongly to a process of myopically bifurcating all matters. President George W. Bush illustrated this world view concisely with: "You're either with us or against us".(2) If the terrorist is our new bogeyman, anti-Communism laid the framework of fear to lead the right-wing to dominate America’s political mainstream in the era after the fall of the Soviet Union and into the dawn of a new era of dread. How did United States popular discourse come to the condition of a world view breaking down issues into black and white? The Political Evolution
This was Gelb’s perspective in 1979, but the fringe right had already begun its assault to seize power and credibility in the political middle ground in the first decade of the Cold War. A Republican senator from Wisconsin first discovered the effectiveness of rousing fears of a formidable threat to the American way of life. The political front to claim mainstream credibility by conservatives began with the initially unremarkable career of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9th, 1950. The exact details of his speech are unclear as few reporters were present, but a version of his speech reports his words as, "I have in my hand a list of 205 cases of individuals who appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party."(4) Those 205 people were employed by the U.S. State Department. McCarthy’s claims sent shockwaves through the State Department shaping the direction of foreign policy in years to come. McCarthy himself was stunned over the media attention that snowballed after his speech. The nation was already gripped by Red paranoia over the current trial of supposed-Soviet spy Alger Hiss, the aggressive nature of the USSR in Europe and its detonation of Joe-1, a 22-kiloton nuclear bomb, the previous August. McCarthy’s political career, amounting to little with his work on housing legislation and sugar rationing, skyrocketed as soon as he became an anti-Communist crusader in the heat of the second Red Scare. McCarthy proceeded to make speeches, accusations and produce figures without evidence which placed him consistently in the media spotlight and thus increased his power and popularity as a politician. McCarthy’s accusations, founded or unfounded, inevitably helped to topple the twenty-year Democratic domination of the presidency which existed following the onset of the Great Depression up to Dwight Eisenhower’s election in 1953. McCarthy was recognized by the Republican Party for this assistance and as a club with which to beat liberal Democrats. He was placed in charge of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to weed out Communists in government institutions, but due to his unreliability and evasiveness was never fully trusted by the party or President Eisenhower. This distrust from mainstream Republicans proved wise when McCarthy made the incredible mistake of attacking the United States military. Aside from accusing Army officer’s of Communist affiliation, he specifically claimed General Ralph W. Zwicker had the intelligence of a “five-year-old child” and that he was “not fit to wear the uniform of a General.”(5) President Eisenhower fed up with the rogue Senator and his right-hand man, Roy Cohn, acting as a prosecutor and not a grand jury, arranged for ABC to broadcast the Army-McCarthy Hearings. The broadcast achieved Eisenhower’s endeavor to ruin McCarthy’s image by exposing him for his bullying tactics. The broadcast left an impression on the American public explicated best by Army Chief Counsel Joseph Welch: “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”(6) In December of 1954 amid public outcry, the Senate condemned McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute," and publicly humiliated himself when he appeared on the program See It Now. McCarthy made a series of attacks on Edward R. Murrow, the respected journalist who had made a film about the senator. The Murrow-bashing attempt only made McCarthy look more like a bully and resulted in an even greater popularity backlash against the anti-Communist opportunist. McCarthy died 18 months later a raging alcoholic, but a legacy of anti-Communism was set in motion. The pioneer TV news journalist Murrow remarked of McCarthy’s reign with a prophetic warning:
To be tough on Communism was a requirement for all politicians throughout the Cold War, and any Democrats finding themselves in the presidency had the greater task of delivering liberal social reform and appearing to be even tougher on Communism than their conservative competitors. A perfect example is Lyndon B. Johnson who gave Americans the Great Society along with escalation of conflict in Vietnam in order to stop the spread of Communism. While anti-Communism was a tool for political advancement, whether rousing such fears was through genuine sentiment or opportunism by a politician, the paranoia becoming instilled in Americans in society at large was quite real. The Vietnam Conflict and the price Americans were willing to pay to contain Communism is an illustration of how successful anti-Communist propaganda(8) and opportunism had effected the average person’s perception of the world. Anti-Communism’s Effect on American Culture? On the 4th of July in 1951, a reporter from the Capital-Times took a petition composed entirely of quotes taken from the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence to people on the streets of Madison. 111 out of 112 people refused to sign the petition. Newspapers around the country tried the same experiment with similar results and some of the people asked to sign the curious petition, composed of what many thought must be Communist ideas, notified the FBI.(9) In this same period, puritan movements to cleanse what was seen as the corrupting, prurient influence of cinema had already been working for decades. The major Hollywood studios set up a Production Code Administration regulated by Washington officials(10) to prevent outcry from groups like the Catholic’s Legion of Decency, but also to avoid government interference into their industry on the grounds that Communist ideas were seeping into the plots of Hollywood productions. While the Production Code Administration proved to be a powerful overseer towards Hollywood’s self-censorship on moral and anti-Communist grounds, another powerful conservative influence entangled itself with the studios during this period that dramatically shaped the nature of the Hollywood cultural industry. A special government investigation of German-American involvement in KKK and Nazi activities in 1938 grew into the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by 1946. HUAC’s purpose? To scrutinize threats of subversion or propaganda that, "attacks the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution."(11) Unlike McCarthy’s committee which hunted for Communist influence in government institutions, HUAC searched for subversion in American society at large. After the committee’s charges against treasonous activities by Algier Hiss proved inconclusive, HUAC went after the Hollywood studios on suspicion of Communist sympathizers in west coast labor unions and, regardless of the Production Code Administration’s censoring, alleged Communist propaganda making its way into Hollywood movies. HUAC in 1947, under Richard Nixon’s leadership, charged the “Hollywood ten” with contempt of Congress after failing to prove an association between the Communist Party and this handful of liberal-minded screenwriters and directors. The contempt charges came from the “Hollywood ten” refusing to answer questions such as, “Are you a member of the Screenwriter’s Guild?”(12) The rejection by the citizens of Madison to sign a petition of quotes from America’s seminal documents appears less paranoid in light that the defense forwarded by the “Hollywood ten” was based on their rights to freedom of expression and freedom of speech granted by the First Amendment. The defense proved unsuccessful and the “Hollywood ten” all received six-month or one-year prison sentences for contempt. Whether the fears of subversion in America were based in fact or paranoia, the actions taken to shape the development of America’s cultural industry by government, grassroots organizations and the self-censorship initiatives all stamped a profound conservative, anti-Communist influence on the Hollywood studios and the entertainment industry as a whole. It is also important to note during this period the popularity of nuclear fallout shelters in home construction as mass-produced suburbs sprung up across the nation. As well, the science fiction genre saw heightened popularity in the 1950s. There was a definite air of paranoia in this decade of some sinister, inhuman enemy planning to infiltrate society and destroy the American way of life. Classic films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the television classic The Twilight Zone respectively reflected this paranoia within American society. Indeed, television played safe too in order to avoid government suspicion of Communist sympathy or promotion. From 1954 to 1962, the hit show Father Knows Best pleased audiences with Jim Anderson coming home from the office everyday to 607 Maple Street in Springfield, USA. Each episode Mr. Anderson would take off his sports jacket, put on his cozy sweater, and deal with the daily troubles of a nuclear, white family without once striking a child, cursing, drinking, and with kids who never got into mischief too serious. Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet offered equally neutered, family-values entertainment so wholesome it would make for endless fodder for cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Matt Groening in later years. The Cold War News The press in an open society where much of the media is privately controlled serves an equally important propaganda function as its counterparts in a closed society such as the USSR, but is far more difficult to recognize. A capitalist, competitive market impedes the press’s ability to uphold its duty of social responsibility in order to maintain enough sales. An audience becomes a product that is sold to advertisers and the huge media corporations needing to operate at minimal costs must rely heavily on official versions of stories passed down from government and corporate PR offices. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky propose a western propaganda model, developing through the Cold War period that operates on five ingredients: profit-orientation of mass media firms, advertising as primary income, official sources, flak from groups offended by stories, and anti-Communism. This propaganda model illustrates how the news agenda is set and maintained as a top-down process.(13) If the top-down process Herman and Chomsky describe is upset among the major press outlets, the media needs to be quite wary of offending groups that could throw flak at them and damage their business whether they are government or private entities. The process to establish a press easily manipulated by official sources began in the decades following WWII. The major press outlets in the U.S. still function in this manner today and some have gone beyond these influential restraints to be direct arms of the Republican Party or wealthy conservatives like Richard Mellon Scaife.(14) Now who are the ‘bad guys’? The Cold War established a mindset in the U.S. that kept people in a state of perpetual fear. This fear not only made Americans wary of potential nuclear Armageddon but of subversive un-American influences that could infect the population through any potential outlet. This fear united many Americans with a common enemy but as well united the bulk of the Republican Party. A bifurcated view of the world had been accepted and reinforced by the populace. Once the USSR fell apart though, some in the right wing sought to perpetuate this black and white point of view. As President George W. Bush stated, "You're either with us or against us".(15) Neoconservatives presently appear to have succeeded in this task where George H.W. Bush failed in defining his vision of a “New World Order”. However, as the new un-American is labeled ‘liberal’ and the new external threat is labeled ‘terrorist’, it was anti-Communism and the Communist bogeyman that indoctrinated America to easily accept this new vision for a revised Cold War. |
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1. Communism is capitalized throughout this work to indicate the Soviet system as opposed to a more general theory of common ownership. |