Response

This essay underscores how Chinese residence in the suburbs crucially shaped the fluctuating image of the suburbs as a place inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities and one that excluded racialized populations with its whites-only restriction. During the early cold war years from 1946 to 1965, the onslaught of Soviet propaganda against U.S. racism made incorporating racial and ethnic minorities within society's institutions imperative to establishing the credibility of American democracy over communism. As the suburbs came to signify the U.S. national identity, the contradictory meanings of suburbanization translated into competing visions of Americanness. Suburbanization as Americanization thus alternately denoted a process of forging whiteness as the marker of legitimate citizenry and of assimilating and recognizing all racial and ethnic minorities as Americans. While many sociological studies focused on Chinese residence in the suburbs as a way to attest to the success of Cold War democracy in creating a socially equitable society, other studies drew attention to the Chinese only to construct the "failure" of blacks to assimilate properly within U.S. society, thus justifying their social and spatial separation from whites. The Chinese significantly functioned in these studies to speak to the leveling of racial stratifications and to explaining the persistence of a white/black divide in early cold war America. This essay also explores the values and terms which shaped the Chinese into assimilable subjects and in particular, how cold war domesticity and its promotion of the ideal of middle-class heterosexual nuclear families influenced the constructed image of the Chinese. It highlights how sociological and historiographical studies along with newspapers and magazine articles published during the early cold war years focused on the growing presence of Chinese women in order to fashion the Chinese in conformity with the domestic ideal. This emphasis helped to transform the "segregated immobility" of bachelors into heterosexual nuclear families, fit for desegregated mobility. The presence of Chinese women thus crucially mediated the terms of cultural membership in the nation. The concluding examination of the Sing Sheng case where a Chinese family battled to reside in a whites-only neighborhood in South San Francisco develops the themes introduced in this essay. It demonstrates how popular newspapers narrated the contradiction over the meaning of Americanness into a contestation over who counts as an American. It also calls attention to the ways newspapers stressed Sheng's role as father, husband, and head of a heterosexual nuclear family, in order to construct him a desirable candidate for residence in the suburbs.

On June 23, 1953, an aspiring poet employed as a copyboy for New York World Telegram wrote a long letter to an old friend in San Jose. The letter ends by reproducing a telegraph sent to President Eisenhower protesting what David Caute has called the midsummer's night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria (62)--the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, so-called spies: are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror (Ginsberg, As Ever 150). Since copyboy was Allen Ginsberg and friend Neal Cassady, letter witnesses a precise intersection of dominant narrative action of early Cold War America and its dissident counternarrative as represented by key figures in emergent Beat movement. However, in context of exemplary character of Beat cultural politics, Ginsberg's telegram of public protest is not just atyp ical--his friends were shocked at him for doing anything outright about his political complaints (Carolyn Cassady, Off Road 222)--but anomalous. What's important is not intersecting of narratives, personal and political, dominant and dissenting, but their correspondence. Defining relation between Cold War and Beat generation along double axis private/public and personal/political, Ginsberg's letter turns out to be a key document, and this unlikely point of departure brings to light a scene that is central to what might be termed political economy of Beat letters. The Rosenberg case was one of a series of national and highly public trials stamped by paranoid style of American politics, a style that responded to global stalemate by waging domestic war on enemies within. This was a total conflict fought on microscopic scale and through inflated symbolic dramas, so that early Cold War years were marked by an unprecedented politicization of culture and by conscription of private life in name of national security. The key to political containment abroad was, then, personal self-containment at home, and Cold War penetration of private by public was as much a matter of patriotic self-policing and voluntary self-censorship as of panoptic state surveillance. In context of this disciplinary and demonizing feature of Cold War culture, hyperbolic escalation of Rosenbergs into evil atom spies--condemned to death by Judge Irving Kaufman for a diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation (qtd. in Caute 67)--represented a definitive es calation of local. The Rosenberg case did not prove that scientific secrets vital to national security had been betrayed. Rather, it proved assumption that an absolute secret existed in first place--what Caute called Myth of Vital Secret--and that it might be given away by what passed for ordinary men and women. Absolute secrets demand absolute secrecy. The Secret therefore motivates all secrets of everyday life and equals their apocalyptically scaled-up master narrative: it symbolized total implications of mundane acts in a war whose front line was, ideally, not just here or there but everywhere and implicating everyone. What turned Rosenberg case into a central document in this politicized field of Cold War culture was its transformation into a particular kind of text-an epistolary text. I refer to Death House Letters, correspondence between Ethel and Julius from their cells in Sing Sing. This notorious exchange served as vital political propaganda for Rosenbergs at time and was then used as an essential text against their intellectual sympathizers in aftermath of their deaths. Here I refer to articles in Commentary and Encounter by Robert Warshaw and Leslie Fiedler respectively, two cultural critics who took it upon themselves to subject Rosenbergs to a second trial, this time by New Critical close readings of their letters. …

This article discusses India’s perceived Sphere of Influence and examines New Delhi’s strategy in the Bay of Bengal (BoB) region during the Cold War (1947–1991) years. Then, this paper discusses how India had largely managed to keep the foreign powers away from the BoB region to maintain its influence and shape a favourable regional architecture. Finally, this paper briefly examines the changed strategic and political situation in the BoB region in present times.

Despite historians' best efforts to disassociate the anti-communist purges of the post-World War II era from one individual's extreme behavior, the early Cold War years continue to be known as the McCarthy era, and Senator Joseph McCarthy remains a symbol—perhaps the paramount symbol—of irrationality and illegitimacy in American politics. His fall from grace in 1954 likewise denotes the return to moral order and political sanity. McCarthy did not introduce the practices and policies of political repression and sexual oppression that constituted the domestic Cold War, and many of those practices and policies outlasted him. Nonetheless, he inhabits our memories as their most visceral representation. The man—his name, his face, as much as his behavior—stands for the era.1KeywordsCultural DiplomacyImperial BrotherhoodSexual OppressionVisceral RepresentationEuropean PressThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Reviewed by: Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953 by Jamil Hasanli Alexander E. Balistreri Jamil Hasanli. Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War, 1945–1953. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. 419 pp. + xvii. Cloth, $116.00; paper, $52.99. ISBN: 978-0739168073. The 1940s, like today, were a period of vertiginous diplomatic flux in Turkish-Russian relations. Those who wish to make sense of the tangled history of these relations will be pleased by the recent English translation of a monograph by historian Jamil Hasanli. Hasanli's Stalin and the Turkish Crisis of the Cold War is a detailed dissection of how Turkish-Soviet relations turned from [End Page 269] one of friendly engagement in the 1930s to one of opposition by the 1950s. Hasanli has made exhaustive use of several former Soviet archives in a way that allows the reader to follow every change of tactical language employed during the early years of the Cold War. This insider view of how Soviet, and to some extent Turkish, diplomats operated constitutes the major contribution of Hasanli's book. The "Turkish Crisis" in the title refers to the Soviet Union's attempt to secure significant territorial and diplomatic concessions from Turkey after World War II. Specifically, the Soviet Union demanded more control over the administration of the Straits, including the operation of a Soviet military base there. As one of its conditions for a renewal of the two countries' treaty of friendship, it also sought the annexation of the districts of Kars and Ardahan, which had previously been administered by the Russian Empire for forty years. In Hasanli's account, the "Turkish Crisis" was closely tied to a similar Soviet attempt to acquire territory from Iranian Azerbaijan during the same period. Hasanli's book proceeds chronologically through the relevant archival materials. It begins by discussing how World War II planted the seeds for postwar Allied competition over the Near East. Next, Hasanli provides a blow-by-blow account of the political wrangling between 1945 and 1947, when the question of Turkish territorial and diplomatic concessions was at its most heated. The discussion of these three years, stretched out between chapters 2 and 7, occupies the overwhelming bulk of the book. A final chapter focuses on Turkish entry into NATO, while a conclusion highlights key events in Turkish-Soviet relations through the end of the Cold War. Aside from the Turkish Crisis, Hasanli makes a number of detours to discuss Soviet claims on Iranian Azerbaijan or intra-Caucasian politics during the early Cold War. Because they cover topics not fully covered in other sources, these excursuses are worth noting even if they are not always directly related to the titular topic of the book. Hasanli clearly articulates two main arguments. First, he argues, it is "Eurocentric" to date the start of the Cold War several years after World War II, either the launch of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 or the Berlin Blockade in 1948. Rather, it was the Soviet demands in the Near East that paved the way for the Cold War (pp. viii, xi). One could easily quibble with the unequivocalness with which Hasanli makes this claim—after all, dating the start of the Cold War depends on how one defines the Cold War, and the Allies faced a great variety of disputes by the end of the war—but his call not to overlook the Near Eastern dimensions of the postwar intra-Allied standoff is well taken. A more strongly worded version of this argument appears later on, where Hasanli writes, "It was the Soviets and their blackmail and threats that compelled Turkey to become a strategic ally of the United States" (pp. 382). Here, such [End Page 270] claims might be tempered by the recent research of Onur İşçi, for example, who demonstrates that leading members of the Turkish administration were enthusiastic about pursuing a strategic alliance with the United States as early as 1943–44.1 A second argument locates Stalin as "the main architect of the 'Turkish Crisis.'" Implicitly rejecting geopolitical reasons for postwar Soviet expansionism, Hasanli writes that Soviet foreign policy "served the interests of Stalin's personal...

Chapter 3 traces the domestic and international political conditions that galvanized novel thinking about American affluence and world poverty in the years of the early Cold War. Following the career of John Kenneth Galbraith, a foremost Keynesian economist and a leading voice of postwar liberalism, this chapter charts the emergence of the empire of affluence as a political idea by exploring the ways in which Galbraith and others articulated the United States’ new global responsibility to solve world poverty. Introducing readers to figures including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr, this chapter charts the emergence of a community of poverty-fighting liberals who sought to influence the policies of the Democratic Party in the early years of the Cold War.

In a July 5, 1958, column called “The Ashes of Death,” writer Eugene Gordon exhorted fellow African Americans to take an active interest in the Geneva conference on nuclear testing. “I submit,” he wrote, “that as Negroes you and I are concerned in at least two terribly important ways … The calcium properties of strontium 90 tend to introduce it into the body’s bone structure—be it a black or a white or a yellow or a brown body—and certain quantities produce bone cancer and leukemia.” The second “terribly important reason” he cited was that “Britain and the U.S. explode their ‘dirtiest’ atomic and hydrogen devices as far away from centers of white population as possible. It was a colored people, too, whom our country used as guineapigs for the first atomic bombs in 1945.”1

Reviewed by: Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature by Kristin L. Matthews Brian K. Goodman Matthews, Kristin L. 2016. Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. $90.00 hc. $29.95 sc. 222 pp. "In the war between capitalism and Communism," wrote the reformed Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers in 1952, "books are weapons, and, like all serviceable weapons, loaded." But as Kristin L. Matthews shows in her valuable study, Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature, by the start of the Cold War books had been treated as loaded weapons for some time. During the Second World War, for instance, the Office of War Information distributed posters reminding American citizens that "BOOKS ARE WEAPONS IN THE WAR OF IDEAS" (22). What was different for Americans during the early Cold War was a new faith in the "seemingly unlimited power" of the United States, a flimsy confidence that still masked a lingering sense of cultural insecurity (11). In Reading America, Matthews introduces us to the extensive postwar "reading industrial complex" that responded to this paradoxical situation by further "weaponizing" long-standing American discourses linking literacy, citizenship, and freedom (18). All this hawkish language is a reminder that scholars of Cold War literary culture are one of the only groups as fond of using martial metaphors as Cold Warriors themselves. By now most recent scholarship in the field has left behind the master trope of "containment," an impressively flexible concept imported from US military and diplomatic strategy. But new research is still being pursued [End Page 571] in the shadow of the so-called "cultural Cold War," a framing that turns scholars into sleuths, sniffing around for evidence of covert CIA funding that might corroborate our most paranoid readings of the period's literature. Matthews successfully avoids this trap in Reading America, while still embracing one of the most promising trends in recent Cold War literary studies: a methodological turn toward book history and the comparative study of print cultures. But unlike recent works such as Greg Barnhisel's indispensable Cold War Modernists (2015), Matthews turns away from the "cultural war abroad," focusing instead on the battles over literacy and reading that raged on the "home front" (14, 16). Matthews begins Reading America by reconstructing the overlapping historical contexts that produced a reading boom in early Cold War America. In her introduction and first chapter, Matthews shows how a range of factors, including the paperback revolution, the G.I. Bill, the rise of New Criticism in universities, the Great Books Program, and popular reading clubs, put more books in American hands than ever before while also prescribing what it meant to be a "good" reader. Meanwhile, the postwar book market was flooded with best-selling reading guides, anticommunist primers, and works by panicked literacy experts with titles like What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't (1961). Matthews describes the new Cold War consensus as the conviction that "reading particular texts in the right way could train Americans to understand, practice, defend, and spread democracy across the globe" (10). In subsequent chapters, Matthews does show how this consensus evolved and fractured over time, but her primary attention shifts to the function of reading within classic works of Cold War literature. For instance, in her second chapter, Matthews explores the "intersections among reading, maturity, and postwar character" in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951), an object of perennial interest for scholars in the field. But whereas previous works by Alan Nadel, Pamela Steinle, and Leerom Medovoi have focused on the public reception of Catcher in the Rye or the ways the book figured in wider cultural debates, Matthews turns inward, performing a counterintuitive reading of the text itself, in order to "illuminate" broader developments in Cold War reading culture (33). Far from characterizing Catcher in the Rye as a novel of rebellion, Matthews presents Salinger's prematurely gray protagonist Holden Caulfield as the fulfillment of the postwar ideal of the "mature citizen-reader" (42). Holden is a nostalgic and censorious reader, a cultural traditionalist [End Page 572] searching for stability and order in a discordant world. According to Matthews, Holden is essentially...

In a speech at the March 1949 Waldorf Peace Conference in New York, Aaron Copland protested the simplistic but widespread dichotomies that the Cold War encouraged, including “communism vs. the profit system” and “the mass-appeal music of a Shostakovich” vs. “the musical radicalism of a Schoenberg.” Having supported causes in the 1930s and 40s that many deemed “dangerously communist” in the early Cold War years—including the Peace Conference—Copland soon realized the urgency of demonstrating his distance from Soviet musical policies. Copland's first use of a twelve-tone technique in his 1950 Piano Quartet can be viewed as a practical demonstration of this distance.

This book which will come as a surprise to many educated observers and historians suggests that Jews and Jewish intellectuals have played a considerable role in the development and shaping of modern American conservatism. The focus is on the rise of a group of Jewish intellectuals and activists known as neoconservatives who began to impact on American public policy during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and most recently in the lead up to and invasion of Iraq. It presents a portrait of the life and work of the original and small group of neocons including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Sidney Hook. This group has grown into a new generation who operate as columnists in conservative think tanks like The Heritage and The American Enterprise Institute, at colleges and universities, and in government in the second Bush Administration including such lightning rod figures as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams. The book suggests the neo cons have been so significant in reshaping modern American conservatism and public policy that they constitute a Neoconservative Revolution.

This paper analyses possible links between the early Cold War and the Western welfare state. These have so far attracted far too little interest among both welfare state and Cold War scholars. The paper argues that the nature of the relationship between the Cold War and the welfare state is too complex to be formulated into a general theory and proposes a research strategy focussing on different mechanisms of interactions. It identifies and discusses four such mechanisms: The possible trade-offs between military and social expenses, the use of the Cold War in political and ideological debates on social reforms, social reforms as an anti-communist strategy, and finally how the Cold War influenced transnational social policy learning.

This chapter examines the successes of Asian Americans in the United States to emphasize the importance of cultural assimilation in bringing about racial integration as well as the willingness and ability of racialized minorities to prove their desirability to dominant society. Using the discourse on the first, it explains how Asian Americans assumed the role of model minorities during the early Cold War years and how the social status of Asians in general was employed as a measure of the credibility of U.S. democracy. The firsts were featured in mainstream periodicals to show how the nation was progressing toward a racially inclusive society. The chapter focuses on three individuals whose professional achievements made headlines during the early Cold War years: Sammy Lee, Jade Snow Wong, and Delbert Wong. Finally, it explores the concept of tokenism and how it undermined the first as an indicator of America's steady progress toward racial equality.

After the Second World War ended in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to seize Qingdao, a major port city on the Shandong Peninsula. The landing of U.S. Marines there foiled the CCP's attempt. With the support of the Kuomintang (KMT)—the CCP's main enemy—the U.S. Marines stayed in Qingdao throughout the civil war in China, from late 1945 to mid-1949. Drawing on archival sources from China, the United States, the former Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Japan, this article explores CCP-KMT-U.S. interactions regarding the presence of U.S. Marines in Qingdao. The KMT-CCP civil war influenced—and was influenced by—the presence of the Marines in Qingdao. The KMT government depended on the U.S. Marines for security, whereas the CCP, opposing the U.S. presence, took a tough propaganda stance but remained cautious in its actions. The United States ultimately decided to withdraw the Marines to avoid overt involvement in the Chinese civil war. This type of triangular engagement influenced the future pattern of Cold War confrontations among the three parties.

This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations during the early Cold War. By tracing the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the Cold War used, altered, and fought over this seemingly universal concept, it deconstructs the assumed binary between realist and idealist foreign policy approaches generally accepted among contemporary policymakers. It argues that a politics of peace emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of a gradual convergence between idealism and realism. A transnational politics of peace succeeded only when idealist objectives met the needs of realist political ambition. It maps three dynamic arenas that together shaped the global discourse on peace: Cold War states, peace advocacy groups, and anticolonial liberationists. The thematic focus on peace moves transnationally where transnational discourses on peace emerged. It reveals the transnational networks that challenged and eventually undermined the Cold War order. It deterritorializes the Cold War by revealing the multiple divides that emerged within each Cold War camp, as peace activists challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace, and also challenged each other over the best strategy. The Politics of Peace assumes a global perspective once peace advocates confronted the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. It thus demonstrates that the Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed.

REVIEWS 529 focusing on films with a strong documentary element, she identifies three distinct periods (the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s and the transition and post-transition era), which epitomize the shift in how 1956 events have been perceived and portrayed by Hungarian filmmakers. In the next chapter, Jeremy Hicks examines the way the Soviet regime chose to use the Soviet wartime newsreel of Holocaust atrocities and the extent to which the Soviet silent footage can achieve true testimonial power if certain narrative and commentary elements introduced by the Soviet propaganda machine are removed. Finally, in the last chapter, Sanja Bahun compares the animation practices of the Zagreb school with those of the Czech filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer, in showing how the relative freedom that animation had in the Soviet block allowed filmmakers to move beyond the dichotomy of conformity versus subversion and, instead, put forward ‘a call for an understanding of these ideologically overdetermined flows as being premised on a considered engagement with the prospective and the potential, rather than being defined by the actual’ (p. 205). As summarized above, the volume is an eclectic compilation of hitherto unaddressed aspects of Eastern European Communist cinematography. Although these investigations are neither representative of all countries in the region, and do not represent the entire period that the title of the volume claims, these works do contribute to the reconceptualization and, ultimately, expansion of our understanding of the multifaceted nature of the cinema of the region; a cinema that is rich and as yet insufficiently explored. UCL SSEES V. Ceban Tomoff, Kiril. Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2015. xi + 262 pp. Table. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Unlike Kiril Tomoff’s pioneering A Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY, 2006), his latest work takes on a relatively familiar story: the Cold War cultural face-off between two ‘imperial projects, the U.S. and the Soviets’ (p. 3). The book would perhaps have been equally pioneering, had it corresponded to the elements on the cover jacket: the combination of the title with a photo of Van Cliburn at the piano alongside conductor Kirill Kondrashin, depicting the American pianist’s triumph at the first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, which leads the reader to expect a book on actual musical competitions during the Cold War. In fact, with only two out of six chapters dealing with such competitions, Tomoff has a different story to tell. In line with familiar accounts of the Cold War, he uses SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 530 a wealth of archival material and several case studies to retell the story of how the Soviets ended up losing the ‘war’ despite winning several of the battles. The mould that shapes Tomoff’s conclusions and arguments is competition (as in striving for superiority, rather than contest as such) versus integration: ‘to reveal how — in competition after competition — Soviet short-term success hid from view a more decisive integration into a global order dominated by the United States’ (p. 3). It is difficult to miss the thrust of this argument, since it is repeated throughout the book, sometimes in the space of a few pages. Although Tomoff claims to use the lens of classical music, his work does not offer much insight into Soviet musical works as such, relying as it does mainly on musical/cultural personalities, institutions and their representatives. Indeed the author seems mainly inclined to explore the Soviets’ combats with and eventual succumbing to the economic and legal systems of the West. Such is the case with the first chapter, where the legal battles surrounding the 20th Century-Fox 1948 anti-Soviet film, The Iron Curtain, are discussed. An abundance of archival materials regarding foreign representatives of the Soviet Union is offered to support the conclusion that the film forced the Soviets to jump into the Western legal system (p. 39). The time-frame of the book is in reality rather narrower than the subtitle suggests. Apart from the first chapter, the study seldom moves outside the boundaries of the 1950s, fortunately without assigning, as is so...