The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955

3. The Cold War Descends

3 The Cold War Descends Franklin Roosevelt had introduced the Four Freedoms as a clear representation of the ideology framing America’s goals in World War II. Though they appeared to be straightforward and relevant when the United States entered the war, the Four Freedoms became subsumed by the complex postwar political landscape. Following Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, the concluding chapter of the war was overseen by Harry Truman. The new president, who had little experience in foreign policy, was at the helm during a significant and transformative moment in global affairs. At the conference between the Allied leaders Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and President Truman in Potsdam, Germany, in the summer of 1945, it was becoming clear that the wartime antifascist coalition between these nations was beginning to unravel.Truman was contemplating the detonation of an atomic bomb on Japan that would not only bring the Pacific war to an end but would also capably demonstrate U.S. military superiority. However, Stalin knew about the bomb and was still adamant about reparations as well as maintaining a buffer zone between his country and Germany. Soon Germany was carved up as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for spheres of influence. In the postwar years, the idea of freedom in Europe was increasingly tied to allegiances between East and West. Just as the union between the three Allied heads of state was breaking down, the antifascist political consensus that had, by and large, been sustained in the United States during the war years was fraying. Within the United States, the meaning of freedom after the war was a contested space; its definition relied largely upon one’s political perspective.As Stuart J. Little has pointed out, American “postwar society churned with dissention” 105 106 · The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World as people came to interpret the war and its meaning in divergent ways.1 Nowhere was the challenge to imbue the idea of postwar freedom with clear parameters more apparent than in the planning and execution of the national traveling exhibit aptly named the Freedom Train. Explanations of the exhibit and reactions to the Freedom Train illustrated contemporary discourses on politics, Communism, and race relations in the wake of World War II. Through the Freedom Train exhibit, various groups from the American Heritage Foundation to the Republican Party to African American activists and conscientious objectors voiced their perspectives on the course of freedom in the postwar era. Perhaps most illuminating was the decision to pull Roosevelt’s influential Four Freedoms speech out of the FreedomTrain exhibition.2 After 1945,it seemed that freedom could not be as tidily summarized as FDR had imagined back in 1941. The Freedom Train was a traveling exhibit that was organized for the 160th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States. It traversed the country by rail departing Philadelphia in September 1947 and terminating its journey in Washington, D.C., in January 1949. In between , the train stopped in hundreds of cities to enable millions of Americans to view its contents. The Freedom Train carried precious cargo: over one hundred documents that traced the development of the idea of political freedom through such notable manuscripts as the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation.An assistant director of public information in the Justice Department came up with the idea for a public display focusing on freedom,butAttorney GeneralTom Clark felt it was important that the exhibit be privately funded. The American Heritage Foundation was incorporated to organize the project with liaisons from the National Archives. The foundation’s board included an array of corporate leaders, including executives from Chase Bank and General Electric and the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, which, as critics from the left pointed out, helped insure the overall message of the Freedom Train “reinforced the purposes of the Big Business sponsors” by highlighting themes such as mass consumption and free enterprise capitalism.3 While the documents on display “espoused pluralism,” the images in the exhibit showed white and The Cold War Descends · 107 middle-class citizens and implied that the role of women was primarily that of a homemaker.4 In short, in its attempt to “sell America to Americans,” the American Heritage Foundation made“no attempt to discuss the Civil War, minority rights, economic rights, or...