The Political Life of Children

In the postwar Unites States, a range of adult actors from the public and private sectors deployed images of innocent, vulnerable, and apolitical children as powerful weapons, at home and abroad, in America's fight to win the Cold War, At the same time, because the anticommunist crusade entailed a battle for "hearts and minds" (p. 6) that fully encompassed the home front and the activities of everyday life, the Cold War also opened up unprecedented opportunities for children to play active roles in national and global politics. It is this dual, intertwined, and often paradoxical relationship of children to the Cold War that Victoria M. Grieve deftly explores in Little Cold Warriors. Unlike Soviet children, who were supposedly brainwashed by state propaganda, American children were conceptualized as politically innocent. It was precisely this innocence that "constituted the basis for their political activities on behalf of the state" (p. 7). Grieve investigates efforts by the federal government, private organizations, corporations, and public schools to inculcate in children a commitment to anticommunism and "world friendship" (p. 4). In this way, children were mobilized to spread "the gospel of American benevolent supremacy" (p. 5), one of the core ethics of Cold War foreign policy.

Grieve's focus on the activities of school-aged children and teenagers oriented toward the "vital center" (p. 197) of American politics contributes to the burgeoning historical literature that examines how "ordinary" Americans engaged with the Cold War, particularly the roles they played in the increasingly important government propaganda and public diplomacy efforts of the postwar period. Going far beyond the nostalgia of Leave it to Beaver and the snapshots of "duck and cover" drills that abide in popular memories of Baby Boomer childhood, Grieve makes a compelling case for the symbolic and literal importance of children to America's global fight against communism. In documenting the wide-ranging ways in which children were called upon and heeded the call to serve as defenders of and diplomats for the nation, she also offers new insight into the emergence of the much more visible and consciously political youthful activism of the 1960s.

In the United States and the Soviet Union, popular culture played a vital role both in educating children about the meaning of the Cold War and also in marshaling children's allegiance to their respective nations' foreign policy assumptions and goals. Grieve's first chapter explores the process by which postwar popular culture functioned to socialize American children "into the new global balance of power" (p. 20) by focusing on their engagement with the multiple and ubiquitous media forms featuring the figure of The Lone Ranger.

First introduced on radio in 1933, The Lone Ranger drew huge audiences at home and abroad as the most popular Western hero in Dell Publishing's "clean" comic book line-up. The adventures of the Masked Man and his Native American companion Tonto were also chronicled in an array of radio and television shows, films, novels, and board games. These media were integrated into children's unstructured play through the merchandizing of themed toys, costumes, and other commercial products. The Lone Ranger glorified America's expansionist frontier past and embodied a set of "American" values—"patriotism, fairness, tolerance, sympathy, religiosity, and pure speech" (p. 30)—that his creators intended children to embrace and imitate. Moreover, the Ranger's paternalistic friendship with Tonto was meant to serve as a model of the "benevolent supremacy" that was to structure America's responsibilities toward and relations with developing nations around the globe. "Like Tonto," Grieve explains, "Third World peoples would yield willingly to a superior political, military, and moral force that would in return ensure prosperity and stability" (p. 21).

In the Soviet Union, state-sponsored children's magazines performed similar nationalist functions to American commercial comics. Although the creation and circulation of The Lone Ranger texts were left to the free market, the U.S. government appropriated the figure of The Lone Ranger to encourage American youth to help finance...