Condensing the Cold War: "Reader's Digest" and American Identity (review)

"Reader's Digest might offer the single most important voice in the creation of popular geopolitics in the twentieth century" (ix). So proclaims Joanne Sharp at the outset of her provocative book. In a kind of classic American studies endeavor, Sharp, a geographer by training, sets herself the task of coming to terms with the "American identity" that Reader's Digest created for its readers from its founding in 1922 to the present. She does so not by looking primarily at the discourse around "America" or "American character" but, rather, by drawing on theories of nationalism that posit the necessity of an enemy for the formation of national identity. Sharp claims that Reader's Digest solidified its image of "America" by portraying the Soviet Union and communism as the polar opposites of American democracy.

Sharp's arguments are, on the whole, well served by the structure of the book and by her methodology. In the first two chapters, she sets out the theoretical framework and the historical context that enable her to make a convincing case for the argument that Reader's Digest—with the second highest circulation of any magazine in the United States (after TV Guide)—both reflected and significantly shaped American public opinion for much of the twentieth century. This happened because the magazine fit well within a capitalist ethos of efficiency, democracy, and consumption. Sharp builds upon the links Benedict Anderson has drawn between the spread of print capitalism and the formation of national identities. She also applies work by Joan Shelly Rubin, Christopher Wilson, and Jackson Lears on the relationship between mass circulation magazines, the rise of a therapeutic ethos, and the institutionalization of middlebrow culture in the early twentieth century.

Sharp claims that by filtering information through the interpretations of "experts," readers were made into passive consumers of knowledge and thus were poised to accept the Digest's conservative views while still believing in their own agency as informed citizens. Reader's Digest's prefabricated (or "digested") knowledge system used facts, a rhetoric of objectivity, and dismissive descriptions of opposing views to make its own "common sense" appear natural and unassailable and to give the appearance of universal coverage.

Sharp spends considerable time at the outset, and throughout the book, dissecting what Hayden White calls "the content of the form" of Digest articles, looking at the structure of the magazine's stories and the techniques that are used to make the articles seem truthful and essential to readers' understanding of world events. Within its rhetoric of objectivity, the magazine contextualizes its stories within "lessons of history"—that is, within an epic narrative of American Manifest Destiny—and uses overtly moralistic language, usually calling for individual action in the face of imminent dangers to the American Way of Life.

The rest of the book (chapters 3 through 7) is devoted to a chronological analysis of the ways in which the magazine portrayed the Soviet Union, communism, and, at the end of the Cold War, various external and internal threats to "America" that demanded both national solidarity and individual initiative. The Digest was initially ambivalent about the Soviet Union. Even when critical of the Soviet system (it was both inefficient and "unnatural") rarely was that system portrayed as a threat to the United States before 1945. Articles that favorably represented the Russian Revolution, Stalin, or the Soviet people often showed gains in terms of the Soviets becoming more like "us" (the natural system); thus there was little danger that Americans, who had no fundamental class conflict, might be attracted to socialism or the Bolshevik version of it. The Moscow trials of the mid-1930s and the Nazi-Soviet pact gave rise to a far more critical image of the Soviet Union as an antidemocratic regime comparable to Nazi Germany, but the wartime alliance tempered this view. It was only...