scholarly journals The Hand that Rocked the Cradle: A Critical Analysis of Rockefeller Philanthropic Funding, 1920-1960

Author(s):  
Brian J. Low

Past research into the mental hygiene movement in Canada and the United States has tended to view it in isolation from co-temporary projects funded by Rockefeller philanthropy, such as mass communications research. The mental hygiene campaign aimed to modify adult-child relations by reducing the influence parents and teachers held over children’s personality development; the central aim of mass communications research was the development of conformity of opinion. One a project of social engineering, the other of social control, the two projects combined appear to have possessed considerable potential to work in concert to shift weight in the socializing matrix from families and schools to the media at the outset of the post-World War II baby boom.

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.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 38-52
Author(s):  
Isabelle Freda

Harry Truman’s succession to the United States presidency upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945 thrust an obscure and inexperienced politician into the center of one of the 20th century’s most critical historical moment: the final months of World War II, as the United States was preparing to deploy nuclear weapons for the first time. Truman’s clear unequalness (in both image and substance) to the tasks at hand, in juxtaposition with the epic scale of the tasks themselves, provides a unique exposure of the illusory nature of presidential authority in the Nuclear Age. Using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as a means of delineating the theory and image of political sovereignty, this essay examines three distinct moments from the early days of Truman’s administration that serve to elucidate the absence of presidential power and control that continues to this day to underlie the media apparatus that defines the American presidency.


Author(s):  
Gerald N. Grob

This article examines the moral/ethical dimensions of psychiatric practice in the United States. It begins with a historical overview of American psychiatry, from the establishment of mental hospitals and asylums to the emergence of institutionalization and the theory of moral treatment. It then turns to a discussion of nineteenth-century initiatives calling for an end to dual responsibility and for the state to assume sole responsibility for persons with severe mental disorders. It also looks at the rise of dynamic psychiatry in the early twentieth century, along with the mental hygiene movement and the introduction of novel therapies such as fever therapy, insulin, metrazol, lobotomy, psychosurgery, and electric shock therapies. Finally, the article considers the transformation of American psychiatry during and after World War II.


2020 ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Justyna Włodarczyk

The article uses posthumanism and animal studies as a framework for making sense of B.F. Skinner’s wartime project of training pigeons to guide missiles, with emphasis on explaining the negative response of the donors and the public. The article first considers the hypothesis that the donors’ incredulity was evoked by the species of the animal. During World War II the United States began a massive program for the training of dogs for the military, and the campaign received unanimously positive publicity in the media. Possibly, thus, dogs were perceived as capable of bravery and sacrifice while pigeons were not. However, messenger pigeons had been traditionally incorporated into the war machine and were perceived as heroic. Thus, the analysis moves on to suggest that the perception of the project as ridiculous was related to the type of behavior performed by the animals: a behavior perceived as trained (artificially acquired) and not instinctive. The analysis then shifts into how the distinction between what is perceived as instinctive (natural) and learned (artificial) behavior influences the reception of different performances involving animals. Performances built around “natural” behaviors generate much stronger positive responses, even if the naturalness of these behaviors is a carefully crafted effect.


1995 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Hickman Barlow ◽  
David E. Barlow ◽  
Theodore G. Chiricos

This study explores the relationship between media portrayal of crime and conditions in the political economy. Based on a content analysis of articles about crime appearing in Time magazine during the post-World War II period, it is argued that news about crime is ideological, that is, it gives an inadequate and distorted picture of the contradictory reality of crime in the context of the capitalist political economy in the United States.


1997 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-154
Author(s):  
Hamilton Cravens

By the middle 1990s the recovery movement for personal self-esteem and, thus, mental health for the individual, had reached a new level of penetration into American culture. Many commentators and interpreters of contemporary affairs judged the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, a potential recruit. As the archetypical adult child of an alcoholic parent—the product of a dysfunctional family if there ever was one, according to the movement's clerics-Clinton seemed lacking in selfesteem. His painful childhood was the culprit. And recovery was the solution. In a word, he was too anxious to please his critics—the classic trademark of the adult child of an alcoholic parent. Contemporary therapists taught that such persons were placaters of their critics because of the emotional abuse that their parents had inflicted on them, often for no apparent reason. The damaged child, regardless of his or her chronological age, could not, without appropriate therapy and personal “recovery,” ever get over such incidents, which were seared into their psychological and neurophysiological apparatus.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254
Author(s):  
Andreu Espasa

De forma un tanto paradójica, a finales de los años treinta, las relaciones entre México y Estados Unidos sufrieron uno de los momentos de máxima tensión, para pasar, a continuación, a experimentar una notable mejoría, alcanzando el cénit en la alianza política y militar sellada durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. El episodio catalizador de la tensión y posterior reconciliación fue, sin duda, el conflicto diplomático planteado tras la nacionalización petrolera de 1938. De entre los factores que propiciaron la solución pacífica y negociada al conflicto petrolero, el presente artículo se centra en analizar dos fenómenos del momento. En primer lugar, siguiendo un orden de relevancia, se examina el papel que tuvo la Guerra Civil Española. Aunque las posturas de ambos gobiernos ante el conflicto español fueron sustancialmente distintas, las interpretaciones y las lecciones sobre sus posibles consecuencias permitieron un mayor entendimiento entre los dos países vecinos. En segundo lugar, también se analizarán las afinidades ideológicas entre el New Deal y el cardenismo en el contexto de la crisis mundial económica y política de los años treinta, con el fin de entender su papel lubricante en las relaciones bilaterales de la época. Somewhat paradoxically, at the end of the 1930s, the relationship between Mexico and the United States experienced one of its tensest moments, after which it dramatically improved, reaching its zenith in the political and military alliance cemented during World War II. The catalyst for this tension and subsequent reconciliation was, without doubt, the diplomatic conflict that arose after the oil nationalization of 1938. Of the various factors that led to a peaceful negotiated solution to the oil conflict, this article focuses on analyzing two phenomena. Firstly—in order of importance—this article examines the role that the Spanish Civil War played. Although the positions of both governments in relation to the Spanish war were significantly different, the interpretations and lessons concerning potential consequences enabled a greater understanding between the two neighboring countries. Secondly, this article also analyzes the ideological affinities between the New Deal and Cardenismo in the context of the global economic and political crisis of the thirties, seeking to understand their role in facilitating bilateral relations during that period.


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