Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s by Victoria M. Grieve (review)

Unsatisfied with nostalgic tendencies that can limit our perceptions of American childhood in the 1950s to simply reflexive duck-and-cover civil defense drills or baby boomer sentimentality, Victoria Grieve thoughtfully examines the neglected ways youth were politicized and mobilized as little cold warriors in the global contest between the capitalist West and communist East. Grieve's work advances along the path of Marilyn Irvin Holt's 2014 book Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945-1960, strengthening the case for the 1950s as a dynamic era in children's history. American children were not simply complacent victims menaced by Soviet indoctrination and the specter of nuclear war; rather, in Grieve's view, young people exercised pronounced agency in waging Cold War, demonstrating levels of civic engagement and defense work generally associated with the home front in World War II.

As the US harnessed every resource at the republic's disposal, culture emerged as a theater of battle; over this contested terrain Grieve traces how childhood was weaponized to favorably influence foreign opinion and demonstrate American superiority abroad. Public and private interests enlisted American youth in new and unprecedented degrees of public diplomacy: trick-or-treating for UNICEF, exchanging original art, photo albums, and pen-pal correspondence with children around the world, donating books to restock war-torn European libraries and used clothing for refugees, or various types of people-to-people exchanges. In these roles, Grieve argues, American children operated as important ambassadors, cultural diplomats, and representatives of their nation.

Akin to Margaret Peacock's 2014 volume Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War, one of Grieve's chief arguments centers on the inherent paradox of innocence when childhood is politicized. Just as youthful innocence needed to be protected—a powerful rationale for containing communism—so too did that imagined innocence constitute the basis for these political activities on the state's behalf. But because adults preferred to see young diplomats as apolitical and free from state sponsorship (as opposed to the perception of brainwashed Soviet children), such youthful volunteerism was framed as an authentic gesture fostering world peace.

The five core chapters begin with the in loco parentis role of comic books in socializing children to America's new obligations as global superpower. Grieve sees The Lone Ranger specifically as a useful allegory for modeling "benevolent supremacy," a vision of the US as savior and civilizer, not conqueror or colonizer. While the idea of postwar children making meaning out of Old West narratives found in television, movies, and literature is well founded, I suggest an alternate childhood reading of the popular Western genre in view of events in the sixties. Perhaps, as writer Tom Engelhardt posits, the ultimate victory of normally peaceful but outnumbered "good guys" shooting it out against ruthless "bad guys" could be understood by children as justification for the winner's use of violence and validation of his virtue.

Grieve's most convincing work focuses on children's involvement in several so-called "camouflaged" propaganda efforts, where governmental agencies, semiprivate organizations, and individuals indirectly collaborated in disseminating pro-American messages overseas and offsetting more overt Soviet information operations. The chapter on international, child-to-child artwork exchange programs uses the group Art for World Friendship (AWF) as an excellent case study for the ways in which the universal language of childhood creativity functioned to simultaneously cultivate international goodwill while showcasing American prosperity.

Little Cold Warriors similarly breaks new ground in the chapter examining the Advertising Council's promotional campaigns as a type of citizenship training, particularly that nonprofit, public relations organization's Crusade for Freedom. In prolific, pro-business messages commonly targeting American schoolchildren, the Advertising Council's gospel of commercial market capitalism familiarized 1950s youth with a fundamental Cold War notion: patriotism demanded consumerism. As Grieve makes clear, the Crusade for Freedom—one of the era's many all-American contests and...