A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society

Introduction

1 introduction when the director Jonathan demme remade The Manchurian Candidate in 2004 he updated several aspects of John Frankenheimer’s classic psychological thriller from the 1960s for a contemporary audience. Among the more noteworthy changes, demme shifted the setting from the Cold war to the war on terror, completely abandoned the mcCarthy-esque character senator Johnny iselin, and transformed the Communist enemy from the original into America’s own corporate allies. As one critic observed, “what was a thriller set in the deepest, darkest paranoid waters of the Cold war has become a sort of post–Gulf war halliburton-dunit.”1 But notably the original film’s central plot device was left essentially unaltered, and the protagonist in both films, raymond shaw, was brainwashed and controlled by external forces. the science behind this process had become more sophisticated in the new film, exchanging Communist hypnosis for microchips, but when demme’s Ben marco (denzel washington) tried to persuade raymond shaw (liev schreiber) that a conspiracy was afoot, the dialogue echoed the same themes of psychological invasion and manipulation as the original: “somebody got into our heads with big steel-toe boots or cable cutters and a chainsaw, and they went to town. neurons got exposed and circuits got rewired. our brain cells got obliterated.” the film’s markedly different politics, gender dynamics, and visions of American democracy speak to the profound changes the united states underwent in the four decades since the original had first played in theaters. however, at its core demme’s The Manchurian Candidate, like Frankenheimer’s version before it, is a film about Americans’ anxieties over individuality in the postwar world.2 Concerns about the state of modern individuality and personal autonomy have been recurring themes in American life, but during the early Cold war they took on a new poignancy when the concept of brainwashing 2 Introduction ushered anxieties over Communist psychological warfare into the center of the national discourse. since the birth of the nation, the belief that human beings have the ability to reason as free and rational subjects has been perhaps the central guiding principle of American political culture, but brainwashing threw many of the underlying assumptions about America’s grand experiment in democracy into a state of flux. do American citizens, who live in a nation that glorifies independent thinkers and individual rights, really have complete control over their actions and beliefs? or are they more like raymond shaw, innocent victims who can be exposed to forces that have developed the psychological tools to get into their heads and “[go] to town”? the public discourse surrounding brainwashing in the 1950s and 1960s indicated that, to varying degrees, we are all raymond shaws. Although the Cold war is over, the mind-set about individuality it fostered remains an integral part of our culture. since the start of the war on terror many of these anxieties have been reborn, although, like the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, their original links to the Cold war have tended to be obscured. Contemporary concerns about the link between violent films and video games and the national epidemic of school shootings , the popular construction of radical muslim terrorists, widespread media reports about the supposed use of propaganda by the administration of George w. Bush, the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the Central intelligence Agency (CiA), and cultural products like the emmy award–winning showtime drama Homeland are all indebted to ideas and anxieties first produced by brainwashing nearly sixty years ago. today, however, many Americans are unaware of the links between contemporary anxieties about individuality and the rhetoric, logic, and original Cold war framework of the brainwashing scare of the 1950s. the purpose of A Cold War State of Mind is to reexamine the history of postwar America through the prism of brainwashing and analyze the mind-set that the concept produced. in the pages that follow, i attempt to recapture what the concept conveyed to audiences during the postwar era and explore the discursive reach of the concept well beyond those years. the fact that brainwashing is so frequently dismissed today as a pseudoscientific reminder of the irrationality and paranoid style of Cold war America has obscured the concept’s true legacy. As this book will demonstrate, the history of brainwashing reveals something more important about American society in the postwar years than a paranoid streak in the body politic, and it had much wider currency and significance in the early 1950s and...