Curbing Containment: Cold War Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Over the last decade, scholars of mid-century literature and culture have produced significant bodies of work that suggest the richness and complexity of the period. Flip missives like Marty Jezer's The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945–1960 (1982) are being replaced by scholarship as multifaceted as the period itself is coming to be seen. Yes, containment policy loomed and The Catcher in the Rye crowded paperback racks, but contemporary work has challenged both the nostalgic views Boomers tend toward and the critical rubrics that have become standard evaluative tools for many scholars. Three recent books promise to revise further our understanding of a period variously labeled "the cold war," "post–World War II," or "the 1950s": Leerom Medovoi's Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity; Andrew Hoberek's The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work; and David Castronovo's Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s That Made American Culture. Taken together, the subtitles of these books invite us to reconsider how the period is most profitably conceptualized. For Medovoi, the unique pressures of cold war rhetoric helped shape the rise of identity and its singular expression—the rebel simultaneously scorned and championed by his (and her, he shows) culture. Hoberek shifts his inquiry from the cold war in favor of a reading conscious of economic and class difference within the nation; hence the focus on post–World War II, a label that evokes not containment but material abundance, the postwar economic upturn that occasioned, Hoberek argues, a transformation of the American middle class that reverberates in mid-century writing. Castronovo, writing an old-fashioned celebration of fifties literature that hums along sans footnotes or works cited, is content to recover the 1950s as such with the aim of proving that the decade was not so stuffy as he supposes others have supposed.

The different labels adopted by these scholars indicate the vigor with which cold war studies (as I like to call it) is being met. In addition to the books under review here, students of cold war culture can pick up volumes as various as Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (2003), David Seed's Brainwashing: The Fictions of Mind Control (2004), Bruce McConachie's American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (2003), and David K. Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004). Those inclined to date things tend to credit the renewal of cold war studies to the cultural turn occasioned by the work of Donald Pease and others in the mid-1980s. Pease's classic essay "Moby-Dick and the Cold War" showed how the favorite texts of the fifties liberal critical establishment reflected the values of containment America: after all, when it came to totalitarian bromides and grim soliloquies, surely Ahab could give Stalin a run for his money. Lary May's still-essential collection Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War followed in 1989 and widened the range of cultural and literary inquiry. In 1991, Thomas Schaub's American Fiction in the Cold War explained how and why American writers and critics moved from the radical left so devastated by Stalinism to the more accommodating liberal-democratic status quo that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously called "the Vital Center." Schaub's book was followed in 1995 by Alan Nadel's enormously influential Containment Culture, which so powerfully demonstrated the pervasiveness of the "containment narrative...