“The Fifties Legacy”

Whitfield's Argument Analysis

The first edition of Stephen Whitfield's survey of American culture during the Cold War years was published in 1991, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the four-decade struggle between the world's two great super powers, and it remains a useful introduction to the ways in which the crusade against communism contributed to the reshaping of American society in the years following World War II (Philip & Landon: 2). Whitfield focuses on the first two decades of the Cold War, the period, he argues, when a political consensus that equated "Americanism" with a militant anti-communism dominated all aspects of American life. By the mid-1960s, however, this dominance began to wane. The Kennedy Administration's movement toward detente with the Soviet Union and an increasingly vocal opposition to the authorities and institutions that enforced Cold War values marked the end of the Cold War culture (Philip & Landon: 15).

Whitfield's ideological perspective is similar to many of the Cold War liberals he cites throughout the book. He has no sympathy for the American leftists who supported the Party through Stalin's purges and his non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Whitfield deliberately chooses to call the Soviet Union's American defenders Stalinists rather than Marxists to emphasize the contrast between socialist ideals and Soviet reality. At the same time, he agrees with Philip Rhav's 1952 observation that "communism was a threat to the United States...but it was not a threat in the United States" (pp. 3-4).

In the opening chapters, Whitfield outlines the events that gave rise to the fears that international communism was undermining America from within and points out how unwarranted these fears were. A weak and divided American Communist Party, under constant FBI surveillance, was not a serious threat to the country (Ram: 89). Nevertheless, accusations of widespread communist influence in the federal government, in colleges and universities, and in Hollywood and its new rival the television industry resulted in hundreds of men and women being denied security clearances, fired from teaching positions, or blacklisted because they had once been associated with liberal and leftist causes.

As Whitfield points out in the third chapter of The Culture of the Cold War, the problem of articulating and celebrating the idea of "Americanism" was more problematic than stigmatizing communism. The traditional American dedication to individualism, to the "liberal stress on rights in political life," and to the belief in private ...