5. The blacklist and the Cold War

Author(s):  
Peter Decherney

Hollywood’s foray into politics during World War II had major repercussions in the postwar period. It led to standoffs with conservative factions in Congress, it fractured the Hollywood community, and prompted the studios to take extreme actions to win back American moviegoers. ‘The blacklist and the Cold War’ considers the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which rode a wave of anti-communism and renewed the offensive against Hollywood. The Hollywood Ten, a group of unfriendly witnesses who stood up for their First Amendment rights and refused to incriminate others, were blacklisted and lost the opportunity to work in Hollywood. The Cold War films from 1942–1953 about the “red menace” of communism are also discussed.

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Lynn

In June 1937, Juliet Poyntz left her boarding room at the American Woman's Association Clubhouse in Manhattan and was never seen again. Poyntz's story might have gone unnoticed if not for the fact that she was a U.S. citizen working for Soviet foreign intelligence. Her task was to recruit others with connections to Germany who would be willing to gather intelligence on the Nazi apparatus. After she disappeared, rumors circulated that she was abducted by the Soviet secret police and murdered or spirited back to the USSR and imprisoned. Anti-Stalinist radicals claimed that Poyntz was disillusioned with the Soviet Union and was murdered in retaliation. After World War II, Poyntz's disappearance fueled the fears of Communists such as Whittaker Chambers who became key witnesses at hearings held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Poyntz's disappearance symbolized the danger of Iosif Stalin's leadership in the 1930s, and after the war this evolved into fears of Communism itself as the main threat. What emerged from both anti-Stalinist radicals in the 1930s and postwar anti-Communists were highly gendered narratives that reveal the evolution of anti-Communist fears—fears that were reflected in Poyntz's fate.


Author(s):  
Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett

Aaron Copland suffered during the Second Red Scare that swept the United States after World War II. When Congressman Fred Busbey announced that the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had compiled “a long record of questionable affiliations” proving Copland a “communist sympathizer” or “fellow traveler,” the 1953 Eisenhower inaugural committee cancelled a planned performance of Copland‘s Lincoln Portrait, and the allegations became national news. Copland’s progressive politics of the 1930s, his involvement in the 1949 Waldorf Peace Conference, and his association with the State Department--which some considered dangerously tolerant of homosexuals--made him a target for anti-communism of the Hearst press, the American Legion, the entertainment industry blacklist Red Channels, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Copland narrowly escaped “naming names.” Though his public reputation ultimately recovered, in the early years of the Cold War his creative spark and cultural influence were sadly diminished.


Author(s):  
Dan Stone

It is tempting to tell the story of Europe in the twentieth century in two halves: the first, a sorry, bleak tale of poverty, war, and genocide; and the second, a happy narrative of stability and the triumph of boring normality over dangerous activism and exuberant politics. When one examines the ‘return of memories’ which could not be articulated in the public sphere during the Cold War, one can see that the years since 1989 are intimately connected to World War II and its aftermath. In many ways, we are only now living through the postwar period. The impact of World War II, the largest and bloodiest conflict in world history, did not end in 1945. This book modifies the emphasis usually placed on the Cold War as the main historical framework for understanding the postwar period. It questions the extent to which 1945 was really a ‘zero hour’ and examines various facets of postwar life – from high politics to economics to tourism and consumerism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”


2021 ◽  

Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance.


Muzikologija ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
Keti Romanu

This paper describes cultural policy in Greece from the end of World War II up to the fall of the junta of colonels in 1974. The writer's object is to show how the Cold War favoured defeated Western countries, which participated effectively in the globalisation of American culture, as in the Western world de-nazification was transformed into a purge of communism. Using the careers of three composers active in communist resistance organizations as examples (Iannis Xenakis, Mikis Theodorakis and Alecos Xenos), the writer describes the repercussions of this phenomenon in Greek musical life and creativity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimia Zare ◽  
Habibollah Saeeidinia

Iran and Russia have common interests, especially in political terms, because of the common borders and territorial neighborhood. This has led to a specific sensitivity to how the two countries are approaching each other. Despite the importance of the two countries' relations, it is observed that in the history of the relations between Iran and Russia, various issues and issues have always been hindered by the close relations between the two countries. The beginning of Iran-Soviet relations during the Second Pahlavi era was accompanied by issues such as World War II and subsequent events. The relations between the two countries were influenced by the factors and system variables of the international system, such as the Cold War, the US-Soviet rivalry, the Second World War and the entry of the Allies into Iran, the deconstruction of the relations between the two post-Cold War superpowers, and so on.The main question of the current research is that the political relations between Iran and Russia influenced by the second Pahlavi period?To answer this question, the hypothesis was that Iran's political economic relations were fluctuating in the second Pahlavi era and influenced by the changing system theory of the international system with the Soviet Union. The findings suggest that various variables such as the structure of the international system and international events, including World War II, the arrival of controversial forces in Iran, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, the US and Soviet policies, and the variables such as the issue of oil Azerbaijan's autonomy, Tudeh's actions in Iran, the issue of fisheries and borders. Also, the policies adopted by Iranian politicians, including negative balance policy, positive nationalism and independent national policy, have affected Iran-Soviet relations. In a general conclusion, from 1320 (1942) to 1357 (1979), the relationship between Iran and Russia has been an upward trend towards peaceful coexistence. But expansion of further relations in the economic, technical and cultural fields has been political rather than political.


2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”


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