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81 3 Korean war Pows and a reevaluation of the national Character After the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed on July 26, 1953, there was a palpable sense of relief that American boys were coming home. the majority of the returning Pows received warm homecomings. As a group, they benefited from largely positive and sympathetic press coverage in the fall and winter of 1953, and the highest-ranking American Pow, Gen. william F. dean, was graced with a ticker-tape parade in new york City. over time, however, these initial good feelings were overshadowed by critics who questioned the mental fortitude and patriotism of the men who had served in Korea.1 As the first large contingent of Americans alleged to have undergone Communist brainwashing, the returning American Pows were studied extensively.2 According to one of their principal defenders, by the end of the decade the American public had concluded that “there had been wholesale collaboration by the American prisoners with their Communist captors and that this unprecedented misbehavior revealed alarming new weaknesses in . . . [the] national character.”3 As a result, the concept triggered a reevaluation of America’s fighting men and helped underwrite a searing critique of the state of American patriotism, mental toughness, and resolve at the height of the Cold war. widespread reports that American Pows had failed to stand up to brainwashing led many contemporary observers to conclude that American men had been mentally unprepared and outmatched in Korea. A photographer for the Associated Press who had spent thirty-three months in a north Korean prison camp gave firsthand testimony in support of this interpretation , calling the American Pows “babes in the woods” and claiming that “they were not mentally equipped or fortified in any way on how to take care of themselves against this intense indoctrination that was poured on H H 82 “There Is No ‘Behind the Lines’ Any Longer” day after day and hour after hour.”4 By the middle of the decade this line of thought had blossomed into a full-blown national debate about the soldiers who had been imprisoned in north Korea. the concept of brainwashing became indelibly tied to reports of their supposedly un-American behavior and led many Americans to believe that the country’s defenses against this new Communist weapon left much to be desired. the journalist eugene Kinkead, one of the most outspoken critics of the Pows throughout the decade, would claim in a book published in 1959 that “when our contact with the enemy was on the field of battle, we fared better than when we met him on a personal basis, face to face, mind to mind, culture to culture, in his prison camps. in a high percentage of these personal meetings, we not only did not hold our own, but we failed signally.”5 A number of experts attributed these failures not only to the potency of Communist methods of manipulation but also to the weaknesses of the Pows. these analysts protested that the Communists had successfully exploited a number of inherent flaws in the prisoners that were indicative of shortcomings in the American character. their criticism turned brainwashing from an indictment of Communist cruelty into a commentary on American life. maj. Clarence l. Anderson, a doctor in the army who had been a Pow in the first north Korean Communist prison camp, said that what stood out the most in regard to the behavior of the Pows was “their almost universal inability to adjust to a primitive situation—a regrettable lack of the old yankee ingenuity, you might say.”6 in Anderson’s opinion, the Pows’ inability to adjust to captivity was directly linked to “a new softness ” in American men.7 Kinkead expanded on Anderson’s comments by connecting the behavior of Pows in the Korean war to American society. he wrote, “it was not just our young soldiers who faced the [Communist] antagonist, but more importantly the entire cultural pattern which produced these young children.”8 For many Americans brainwashing highlighted a precipitous decline in traditional American values and the nation’s inability to conjure up the psychological tenacity the Cold war demanded. in a letter to the adjutant general in washington, a dean of cadets in Chicago named maj. Bert e. Grove claimed that the current publicity surrounding the returning Pows was making it difficult to “inculcate [his cadets] with true Americanism here at morgan Park military academy.” Grove said he could not “go along with this ‘brain...

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