Cold War

Postwar Anxieties

A major basis of Cold War anxiety was the fear that the defining features of American life weakened both American men and the nation, thus rendering both unable to confront the perceived threat of Soviet communism abroad and at home. In an often contradictory fashion, American commentators of the 1940s and 1950s identified the sources of this weakness as postwar material abundance, conformity (as well as nonconformity), overprotective mothers, negligent parents, governmental and corporate paternalism, and rampant homosexuality (which Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) had shown to be far more widespread in U.S. society than most had believed). Corporate capitalism, in particular, caused anxious concerns. Bureaucratic and regimented workplaces, critics argued, seemed to have undermined the manhood of American men. Suggesting that American men had become alienated and emasculated by corporate work and suburban life, C. Wright Mills's White Collar (1951) and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) maintained that manliness could be affirmed through independence, self-determination, and the exercise of power.

Masculinity and 1950s Domesticity

Cold War anxieties regarding American manhood often equated communism with voracious femininity or seductive female sexuality. In the novels of Mickey Spillane, such as One Lonely Night (1951) and Kiss Me Deadly (1952), women who work for communists take advantage of weak men who are unable to resist their seductive wiles. In these tales, only the protoganist/hero Mike Hammer—whose name suggests the association many Americans perceived between masculinity, physical toughness, and Americanism—possesses the fortitude necessary for triumph over these figures. In an even more [Page 100]frightening image, the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate showed a brainwashed U.S. soldier accepting orders from a female enemy agent. Such popular-culture images suggested that any effective containment of communism would require the containment of femininity and an assertion of the traditional gender hierarchy. The Cold War thus provided a powerful impetus for a pronounced cultural emphasis on conventional domesticity as a pillar of American life.

The importance of traditional ideals of domesticity and femininity to American Cold War posturing was apparent in 1959, when Vice President Richard M. Nixon traveled to Moscow to open and attend an American exhibit that consisted mostly of an average American suburban home with all the modern conveniences. This exhibit became the site of the famous “kitchen debate” between Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In the debate, Nixon praised the material abundance of American life as a sign of the superiority of the American capitalist system. His argument that U.S. superiority and freedom ultimately depended less on weaponry than on material abundance and a middle-class suburban lifestyle implied that it also rested on full-time female homemakers and male providers. The containment of communism abroad, Nixon suggested, required the containment of female sexuality through motherhood—and the activity of American men in the public world of capitalist exchange.

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