Jim Crow's Cold War

Mary L. Dudziak. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 330 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

During the decade from 1965 to 1975 a striking inversion took place in American politics: the Cold War went from being a liberal cause to a conservative one. In 1965 the most liberal administration in American history--Lyndon Johnson's--led the United States into a full-blown war in Vietnam, pushing the limits of Cold War containment farther than any administration before (or after, as things turned out). By 1975 liberals had long since abandoned Vietnam, and they were in full flight from containment and anything that smacked of what now seemed that nasty old Cold War. Meanwhile conservatives, who in the early days of the Cold War had looked askance at the federal activism implicit in involvement overseas, embraced the policy of containment as never before. Led by recent recruits to the conservative cause--the so-called neoconservatives--they decried détente, Richard Nixon's deescalation of the Cold War, and beat the drums for a revival of the armed struggle against communism.

This transformation had obvious effects on American diplomacy; less obvious but no less significant were its effects on American domestic politics. For twenty years, from 1945 to 1965, the Cold War furnished a comprehensive view of the world. Communism was evil and aggressive and must be opposed by all means. Military strength was the first requisite; hence the weapons race and permanently enlarged armed forces. Alliances augmented America's own military strength; hence NATO, SEATO, CENTO, ANZUS, the Rio Pact and sundry bilateral arrangements. Covert operations could complement the work of American soldiers and diplomats; hence the CIA and its secret wars in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, the Congo and Cuba. Solidarity at home was essential; hence Harry Truman's loyalty probes, Joseph McCarthy's search for communists, and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The Cold War wasn't really a war, but in its effects on the American psyche it was almost indistinguishable from a war. During every war in their history the American people had accepted an enlargement of the realm of government beyond anything they tolerated in peacetime. Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Congress conscripted soldiers, issued greenbacks, levied income taxes, suspended habeas corpus, and confiscated billions of dollars of property (in the form of southern slaves). Woodrow Wilson and the executive branch in World War I commandeered industry, propagandized the American public, suppressed strikes and jailed dissenters. Franklin Roosevelt's administration in World War II did everything Wilson's had done, but on a larger scale, and added, among other innovations, the internment of Japanese-Americans and the drafting of scientists into the largest federal research and development operation to that point in American history--the Manhattan Project. Typically the realm of government contracted after each war, although, political friction being what it is, rarely quite back to its prewar level.

The expected contraction commenced after World War II, but the outbreak of the Cold War halted it, then reversed it. In essence, throughout the 1950s and 1960s the country remained on a permanent war footing. As they had during earlier wars, so during the Cold War Americans looked to government to defend them; and as they had during earlier wars, they gave government great benefit of the doubt in defining what the national defense required. During the Cold War the reach of government--preeminently the federal government--expanded enormously. Activities formerly the province of the private sector or the states were now swept into the national realm. The federal government built the interstate highway system, in the name of national defense. The federal government funneled aid to colleges and universities, in the name of national defense. The federal government sponsored scientific research and development, in the name of national defense.

And the federal government closely monitored the American image overseas. Especially as the...