American Cold War Culture (review)

Interpretations of "cold war culture" increasingly appear less the output of a cottage industry than a mechanized assembly line. In the United States, interest in the cold war—often shrunken to synonymity with McCarthyism—has never flagged. However, uncanny parallels between the "war on terror" and the war against totalitarianism, remarked on by many contributors to Field's volume and the editor himself, have provided an additional fillip to cold war scholarly production.

Contemporary preoccupations overhang several essays in American Cold War Culture. But yoking past to present in order to demonstrate the author's distance from both (America's "paranoid style" given polemical treatment) does not necessarily deepen our understanding of the ostensible object of critical investigation. The cold war remains elusive here. Its mushroom-cloud pall shrouds the proceedings, but frequently remains so diffuse as to evade scrutiny except at the level of atmospheric abstraction.

Some of the nine essays gathered here would work just as well—or indeed read more satisfactorily—if "postwar" or "fifties" were substituted for "cold war". All contributions concentrate solely on the Truman/Eisenhower years, and for some "cold war" serves as little more than a loose temporal marker. For others it provides a set of overarching (or overdetermined) metaphors that infused cultural practice as a whole. Reduced to a single suggestive phrase, "boundary issues" serves as the common denomination of America's cold war pathology shared by Field and many of his contributors: a state incapable of recognizing where "self" ended and "other" began; paranoid about invasions, infections, and impurities; constantly overreaching in its attempts at inoculation, and oscillating between a desire to incorporate and expunge foreign bodies.

The postwar polio crisis was thus (in Jacqueline Foertsch's study) a manifestation of the body politic's own affliction. Cold war epidemiology's concern with distinguishing the diseased from the healthy mirrored the era's other great epistemological uncertainties. Holden Caulfield's question was expressive not just of his age but the age: how to discover the authentic in a world of phoneys? In an age menaced by masquerade, how to unmask subversives posing as patriots? Or recognize those who surreptitiously "passed"—as straight, as white—from those who indisputably were? Anxieties occasioned by inauthenticity are explored, in quite different ways, by Robert J. Corber's essay on the "Subversive Femme" in All About Eve and Douglas Field's consideration of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

With a duly acknowledged debt to Alan Nadel, many of the essays conceive "containment" as cold war America's pre-eminent mode of acting out. Measures to surveil, quarantine, and categorize formed the Sisyphean labors of the national security state, with disorder threatening to seep through the constantly re-stacked sandbags. Yet for several of the authors represented here, the United States' obsessive and oppressive boundary-maintenance was a thoroughly self-assigned burden—or not a burden at all but the era's most egregious act of deception. Certainly in the opinion of Field and David Ryan (in an essay entitled "Mapping Containment"), activity that the state announced as defensive is better understood as rampant assertion, whether to bolster global US hegemony or shore up a normative American identity in the face of incipient challenges from within.

While the cold war's procedures were all too palpable, its origins strike many contributors as flimsily constructed. America's campaign against communism appears, as Mary Kaldor put it, an "imaginary war," waged against a bogey that presented no serious challenge to US interests. As several authors conceive it, the cold war was a thoroughly one-sided business, if not simply a smokescreen for repression spuriously undertaken in the name of anti-communism. Crippled by war and eager to be left alone with the colossal task of reconstruction, the Soviet Union presented no threat to America, Ryan proposes. Scott Lucas concurs, in an essay on George Orwell's now well-rehearsed exercise in naming names (of those whom he considered communists and "cryptos") to the Foreign Office's Information...