Cold War Progressives

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Castledine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism

2017 ◽  
pp. 129-158
Author(s):  
Mark C. Jerng
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Milton Friedman ◽  
Gary Becker ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Sword And Sorcery ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Market Economics

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.

Building a Left Coast: The Legacy of the California Popular Front and the Challenge to Cold War Liberalism in the Post-World War II Era

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
New Politics ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Sweden, Europe, and the Cold War: A Reappraisal

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryo Makko
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Third World ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Traditionally, Sweden has been portrayed as an active bridge-builder in international politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The country advocated a “third way” toward democratic socialism and greater “justice” in international affairs, but these foreign policy prescriptions were never applied to European affairs. This article examines Sweden's relations with Europe by contrasting European integration with the Cold War. Negotiations on Swedish membership in the European Communities and Swedish policy at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe were influenced by a general Berührungsangst toward Europe, which persisted during the years of détente. Because Swedish decision-makers believed that heavy involvement in European affairs would constrict Sweden's freedom of action, Swedish leaders' moral proclamations were applied exclusively to distant Third World countries rather than the egregious abuses of human rights in the Soviet bloc.

Behind the atomic curtain: School desegregation and territoriality in the early Cold War

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
James T. Sparrow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Security ◽  
Gender Equity ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Red Flags ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations

The early Cold War was, infamously, a time of political retrenchment, when anticommunists exploited popular fears and national security pretexts to squelch the democratic energies of the Popular Front. Left-led unions and civil rights organizations alike purged their leadership of any communist affiliation, while professional anticommunists pushed other organizations on the Left to do the same or land on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Support for left-liberal causes such as anti-fascism, labor rights, gender equity, and racial equality' provided red flags for investigators and agitators on the prowl for evidence of internal subversion.1

Margaret A. Simons, Rebel at Heart

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-335
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Simons ◽  
Erika Ruonakoski
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Ideas

Abstract In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

“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.

Mass Immunization in East Asia and Global Health, 1960–80

2019 ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Rural Health ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Mass Immunization ◽  
The Republic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter investigates the role of mass immunization in Chinese medical diplomacy programs during the 1960s and 1970s. While most scholarship has stressed the influence of barefoot doctor and other paraprofessional training programs in the emergence of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a global model for rural health services, mass immunization programs in China had measurable results—in terms of lowered incidence of disease—that helped legitimize these training efforts and the nation's program of rural health care more broadly. Ultimately, the global popularization of Chinese public health was a consequence of regional competition within East Asia. During the Cold War era, the PRC used medical aid to foreign countries to compete for power and influence with the Republic of China on Taiwan, where institutions and personnel that the Nationalist Party brought to the island after 1948 built upon practices established during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). The involvement of Taiwan in medical diplomacy reflected the expansionist agendas of its Western allies in the Cold War as well as competition with the PRC for recognition as the legitimate government of mainland China.

The Antielitist Elite

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Corporate Elites ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Yorkers

The cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s created problems and opportunities for elites. In these decades the upper- and middle classes went from being seen as the wellspring of social virtue in Victorian culture to being perceived as repressed, stuffy, and out of touch; after all, they were the prime beneficiaries of a status quo that was now found wanting. From lording it over commoners in the eighteenth century, to loathing the dangerous classes in the nineteenth century, many elite New Yorkers came around to romanticizing African-Americans and other lower-class groups as exemplars of human spirit and social justice. These actions were in many cases genuine, yet in espousing civil rights causes and tackling discrimination and poverty, in exposing the falseness and superficiality of genteel society, upper-class New Yorkers also established their own heightened sensitivity as anti-elitists and their own legitimacy. Corporate elites thus championed achievement and diversity as the foundation of a more democratic, anti-elitist elite.

Democratic Fantasies vs. Cold War Realities

2018 ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
White House ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
National Review ◽  
The World ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War

The strain of Black Nationalism that existed within the United Nations also worried conservatives as they monitored the evolution of events in Southern Africa. In their intense desire to rid the world of communism, other issues, such as race, were either marginalized or ignored. The chapter analyzes the three publications’ view of race as it relates to the issue of Rhodesia during the height of the Cold War. In ignoring the suppression of an entire race of people, Human Events and National Review contrasted what they perceived to be a stable, anticommunist, biracial society with the militarism and lawlessness that they argued defined the 1960s and 1970s. While the two conservative publications viewed Rhodesia as a model of biracial success, Commentary focused on the Carter administration’s dismissive attitude about the dangers of Soviet encroachment within the African hemisphere. The Right argued that the Carter White House, in its refusal to endorse Rhodesia’s 1979 parliamentary elections due to a lack of representation of militant nationalist groups, and its belief in the policy of détente, continued to send a message of American weakness and indifference to totalitarianism around the world.

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