“A Saga of Democracy”: Toy Len Goon, American Mother of the Year, and the Cultural Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiou-Ling Yeh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
American Press ◽  
Cultural Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Chinese Mother

In 1952 Toy Len Goon, an unknown Chinese immigrant, a widowed mother of eight, and a laundry shop owner, was selected to be Maine Mother of the Year and later won the national title as American Mother of the Year. The news was circulated widely in domestic media, propaganda abroad, the Chinese American press, and newspapers in Taiwan. This article examines the meaning of how a self-employed Chinese mother, against the dominant discourse of white, middle-class domesticity, was promoted as a rhetorical tool domestically and globally in the Cold War ideology of containment and integration. The Goon case illustrates the complexity of the cultural Cold War and indexes the ways that multiple layers of power and resistance operated under the banner of containment.

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

Morale

Sanitized Sex ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kramm
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Sex Education ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
White Community ◽  
Guidance Programs ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
The Cold War

The global legacy of moral reform, its intersection with social hygienic knowledge, and its impact on the Cold War is the main theme of chapter 4. It analyzes sex education and character-guidance programs, a terrain in which moral reformers and social hygienists clashed but occasionally also cooperated, which incorporated specific ideals of masculinity, middle-class family values, and white community building that American Cold War ideology popularized and military educators propagated to occupation personnel. Secondly, chapter 4 discusses morality concerning sexuality and prostitution among Japanese contemporaries. Moral debates focused especially on the streetwalking prostitute, embodied by the panpan girl. She became a famous symbol, who vividly represented the revolutionary changes of democratizing Japan but was also perceived as incarnation of moral and social decay.

scholarly journals FORMING THE IMAGE OF A SOVIET ENEMY: A STUDY OF THE AMERICAN PRESS AND OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS OF THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR

2018 ◽  
pp. 49-51
Author(s):  
Yu. Yu. Shamatova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
White House ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
The World ◽  
American Press ◽  
The Cold War

The article is devoted to a review of materials of the American press and official documents of the White House in 1946-1953-ies. The focus is on analyzing the techniques and methods used in periodical and daily publications to construct a negative image of yesterday's ally in the person of the Soviets. Informational and ideological indoctrination of the population affected not only the adult population, but also the younger generation. For this purpose, various comics were created, cards that contained information about the approaching threat from the USSR. As a result, by the early 1950s the state apparatus managed to radically change public opinion: the positive image of the Soviet Union in the eyes of Americans was replaced by skepticism about the future relations of the superpowers and confidence in the new war to cleanse the world of the "red plague".

Culture, Politics and the Cold War: The Sociedad de Escritores de Chile in the 1950s

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (03) ◽  
pp. 549-571
Author(s):  
Jorge A. Nállim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
Local Branch ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cultural Cold War ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Political Groups

AbstractIn the 1950s, the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile experienced bitter disputes caused by the efforts of the Chilean Committee for Cultural Freedom, the local branch of a major institution in the US cultural Cold War, to gain control of the association. These disputes reveal the role played by the cultural Cold War in the breakdown of older political and intellectual alliances in Chile. They also highlight the transnational networks that connected Chilean writers during the Cold War, and the complex articulation of local and international contexts and agendas that influenced Chilean cultural and political groups.

To Be an Apolitical Political Scientist: A Chinese Immigrant Scholar and (Geo)politicized American Higher Education

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-155
Author(s):  
Qing Liu
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Chinese Identity ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Cold War

While educating international students is celebrated as a means of promoting mutual understanding among nations, American higher education has always been entangled with geopolitics. This essay focuses on Tang Tsou, the Chinese scholar who came to the United States as a student in 1941, eventually becoming the nation's leading China expert and producing knowledge about China for the United States during the Cold War. It analyzes how Tsou navigated a complex political terrain in which his Chinese identity was both a professional asset and a liability. Examining Tsou's personal and professional decisions as well as his response to the politicization of his Chinese identity reveals the (geo)politicization of higher education more broadly.

Rough Draft

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Rutenberg
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
White Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
Selective Service ◽  
Selective Service System ◽  
The Cold War

This book argues that policy makers’ idealized conceptions of middle-class masculinity directly affected who they targeted for conscription during the Cold War. Along with much of the American population, federal officials, including those within the Selective Service System, believed college educated men could better protect the nation from the threat of communism as civilians than as soldiers. The availability of deferments for these men grew rapidly between 1945 and 1965, militarizing their occupations and making it less and less likely that middle-class white men would serve in the Cold War military. Meanwhile, officials used the War on Poverty to target poorer men for conscription in the hopes that military service would offer them skills they could use in civilian life. Therefore, while some men resisted military service in Vietnam for reasons of political conscience, most of those who avoided military service did so because manpower polices made it possible. By protecting middle-class breadwinners in the name of national security, policy planners militarized certain civilian roles, a move that, ironically, separated military service from the obligations of masculine citizenship and, ultimately, helped kill the draft in the United States.

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