A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society by Matthew W. Dunne (review)

Midway through the twentieth century “brainwashing” made its debut on the cultural stage, quickly progressing from bit part to leading player in the protracted U.S. Cold War melodrama. Matthew W. Dunne traces this arc from the term’s coinage by journalist Edward Hunter in the Miami News in 1950 to a full-fledged moral panic over the alleged collapse of U.S. prisoners of war in communist captivity during the Korean War. Thereafter, the concept migrated to diverse sites of social anxiety, from the advertising industry’s “hidden persuaders” to suburbia’s stultifying homogenization. When brainwashing’s imagined practitioners were no longer commies but comic books, notions of mind control lost some of their terrifying aura. But Dunne points to the enduring afterlife of a quintessential Cold War concept that has continued to inform how Americans understand processes of radicalization and subversion in the “war on terror.”

Dunne stresses at the outset that his goal is not to “delve into questions related to the actual legitimacy of brainwashing as a technique of mind control” (p. 3). His is not a study of how and whether a brain might be washed, but rather an exploration of a peculiarly powerful trope. (Historians of medicine interested in the neurological backstory might consult the work of Rebecca Lemov, and follow the progress of a new project on the “psy” sciences and brainwashing directed by Daniel Pick at Birkbeck College, London.) In short, the “cold war state of mind” of primary interest to Dunne belongs to Americans convinced that minds could be reprogrammed, not the cognitive processes of those believed to have been brainwashed.

How, then, did Americans fall prey to a collective conviction—or delusion—that brains were susceptible to external hijacking, whether by Pavlovian psychologists, the “mad men” of Madison Avenue, or creators of MAD magazine? Dunne’s analysis centers on the Korean War POWs whose acts of collaboration with their communist captors culminated in the defection of twenty-one “turncoat GIs” to the People’s Republic of China in 1953. At the height of the McCarthy era, many Americans seemingly found it easier to believe that their compatriots must have been browbeaten, bamboozled, or otherwise seduced into refusing repatriation than to concede that a tiny proportion of U.S. prisoners might, for various reasons, have preferred China as a postwar destination. That these young men had been “brainwashed” became a standard explanation, simultaneously reassuring and terrifying in its implications. This motif assumed graphic form in brainwashing’s ur-text, The Manchurian Candidate: Richard Condon’s 1959 novel adapted for the cinema by John Frankenheimer in 1962.

Dunne rehearses this history in lucid and readable style. But A Cold War State of Mind is not a strikingly original volume. Over the past decade, several scholars have examined the separate pieces of this puzzle and put them together in essentially the same pattern. Dunne’s two explicit claims to originality both fall rather short. Billing his analysis as rooted in the experience of “ordinary citizens,” the author gestures toward a bottom-up history of the “lived experience of Communist mind control” (p. 8) that his source materials fail to yield. A Cold War State of Mind is derived largely from declassified official documents, cultural texts, and the popular press of the day. Except as everyday folk wrote letters to editors or were, on occasion, quoted in newspaper stories, their voices remain muted. Dunne largely neglects repositories of personal papers and oral histories, such as those that inform Charles S. Young’s Name, Rank and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2014).

If Dunne underfulfils his promise to explore popular emotionalism, his second claim to originality errs in the other direction. Seized of his trope, Dunne ascribes uncanny causative power to the specter of brainwashing. Americans...