The Conquest of Cool

Thomas Frank. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. University of Chicago Press, 1997

Frank considers the standard binary historical narrative of the 1960's--in which the conformist, sterile world of the Fifties was challenged from below by a youth-driven counterculture which was fundamentally at odds with the conservative world of corporate capitalism, only to be eventually co-opted by the latter in the wake of post-Vietnam/post-Watergate disappointments--to be at odds with what he learned studying business management literature of the era, as well as the advertising that supposedly change-averse Madison Avenue created. In Frank's telling, the counterculture came not as a shock to the leaders of advertising in the 60's, but rather as the producer of a welcome ready-made vocabulary to express the dynamic structural and conceptual changes they felt the industry needed. The counterculture was seen as an ally and a source of energy, ideas, and (superficial) content by the men (and some women) who sought to remake the world of advertising and consumption in 1960's America.

The dissatisfaction with conformity and older modes of consumption were bubbling in the world of advertising and business long before the counterculture came along to be supposedly co-opted. The embrace of "youth" and "youthfulness" wasn't just about a large and affluent new demographic group--after all, Frank points out that the advertising of the era had little to say to young members of Nixon's "Silent Majority". Instead, constant appeals to "youthfulness" allowed advertisers to transcend previous discourses of consumerism which were stale and no longer effective.

The rhetoric of rebellion and non-conformity for their own sake--as virtues in and of themselves--became the basis of the new consumerism; one which is with us still.

Citizenship in Cold War America

Andrea Friedman. Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

In the Introduction, Friedman admits that her book "tell citizenship stories that at first glance seem only loosely related, although a close reading will reveal the many ways in which they overlap and intertwine." (12) There is much to admire in her book, but in the end even a second or third look will likely leave the reader feeling that the commonalities between the five chapters are not strong enough or convincing enough to justify the title or the contention that there is a large truth about citizenship being told here. If one sets aside the claims made in the Introduction and the even-less-convincing Conclusion, however, the reader can profit from this book as a collection of five Cold War-era case studies in which a handful of themes recur to varying degrees.

The problem with Friedman's attempt to turn this collection of case studies into a cohesive argument is that she shifts the center of her interpretive framework back and forth through the book. While Chapter 1 puts the emphasis squarely on Cold War psychology, later chapters will focus more on the concept of state violence and its legitimization as well--the psychological focus is still there, but it's hard to see how much the chapter on juvenile delinquency and comic books has to do with Cold War citizenship. The commonalities that actually do tie Chapters 2 through 5 together have more to do with the ways in which psychology was used to either resist or justify state violence against various groups and individuals than with Friedman's argument on the shaping of citizenship by dissent.

There are many interesting tangents in this book--considerations of how Communism was defined in contrast to "healthy" psychologies; the role of masculinity and aggression in defining Cold War citizenship; the degree to which state violence was justified and masked by the emerging security state; and more. Friedman might have been better off dividing this study into more than one book, as some of the chapters only hint at what might be a more fleshed out narrative given time and space to provide context. Also, she sometimes fails to make it clear where the reader's focus should be. Chapter 4, a study of Puerto Rican nationalism, does not focus on the ostensible subject until more than halfway through.

Cold War Civil Rights

Mary L. Dudziak. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

During the the early decades of the Cold War, the United States sought to win the ideological battle against the Soviet Union by stressing the positive aspects of a democratic system to those of a totalitarian Communist model. One glaring weakness for the American argument was the reality of institutional racism and legal segregation within American society and institutions such as the military. In the post-colonial era, as the majority of African nations and many Asian nations won their independence from European colonialism, the global image of the second-class status of African-Americans was increasingly seen as a liability by high-ranking foreign policy officials, congressional leaders, and several Presidents. The "world was watching" as African-Americans fought for equal rights, as Brown v. Board of Education worked its way through the Supreme Court, as Arkansas National Guardsmen prohibited black students from attending Central High School in Little Rock; and so on.

Dudziak recreates the history of America's domestic Civil Rights struggle from the vantage point of a political elite that was keenly aware of what governments, media outlets, activists, and public opinion polls were saying in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Communist bloc. This isn't an international history, but rather a domestic history that acknowledges that rigid boundaries between different conceptual approaches to American history can distort our understanding of the very subject we are trying to focus on.

The centrality of foreign opinion to Civil Rights considerations by the foreign policy establishment came to an end in the second half of the 1960's for a variety of reasons. The establishment of formal, legal equality was in line with American ideals of democratic equality; the subsequent shifting of attention to more class-based issues was outside of the accepted narrative for the pro-capitalist establishment. The growing radicalization of the movement cleaved the previous national consensus on Civil Rights. And increasingly, the Vietnam War, not the Civil Rights struggle, would define America's image overseas.

America's Cold War

Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Craig and Logevall approach the Cold War from the vantage point of domestic politics. They acknowledge that this approach is somewhat out of step with the more internationalist vantage point may other scholars take, but while they concede that the internationalist view has ample merit and is an important endeavor, they point out that excessively “de-centering” the Cold War “runs the risk of assigning greater agency to these other actors than they deserve” (5). The power balance was asymmetrical; furthermore, the documentary records that so many historians rely on tend not to reflect domestic political considerations but rather internal foreign policy deliberations. Ultimately, the authors conclude that while the Cold War was largely a success for the United States, it went on too long and at too high a cost relative to the actual security threat posed by the USSR. Cold War policy was vested in the executive branch from the Truman Administration on, and too often, Presidents based policy on their own political fortunes as well as those of their party (LBJ in particular worried about the fate of his Great Society initiatives). Therefore, the United States often chose confrontation when containment would do, and all too often made moral compromises and inflicted military violence on foreign populations for no clear foreign policy advantage.

The structure of the book in chronological, beginning during the mid-years of World War II and ending during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush. This straight-forward structure is framed by a 1984 speech by one of the original architects of the Cold War containment strategy, George F. Kennan. Kennan had long been leery of the degree to which his original strategic approach to the Soviet threat had taken on a life of its own, un-moored from actual strategic considerations or the capabilities of the Soviet Union. By 1984, he was concerned enough to give a public speech in the midst of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign on the subject.

The authors clearly agree with Kennan's larger view, but at the same time they argue that the Cold War was in arguably an American success; the Soviet Union was ultimately vanquished, and the American people were able to enjoy relatively peace and historically unparalleled prosperity during the conflict. In other words, Kennan's basic premise--that the USSR represented a genuine security threat, which could be best faced by boxing it in internationally and forcing its internal contradictions to undo it--was entirely correct. Had US Cold War policy adhered to the policy of containment, the triumph would have been relatively unambiguous.

But, unfortunately, domestic political pressures--the rightward shift of American foreign policy, the growing political clout and economic importance of the military-industrial complex, etc.--mitigated against restricting American policy to the parameters Kennan had sketched out. President after President felt compelled to prove himself "tough on Communism" and to escalate military posturing when diplomacy often might have been more effective. The Cold War was an American victory, but the cost was unjustifiably high.

Gay New York

George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books (Harper Collins), 1994.

Contemporary accounts of the gay rights movement tend to begin with, or right around the Stonewall Riot of 1969. A common assumption of these narratives is that gay Americans had been living closeted lives continuously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to that point, when the example of the Civil Rights movement and the loosening of traditional social constraints in the Sixties finally allowed gays to assert themselves in the public sphere. Chauncey directly challenges that orthodoxy, recreating a history of a gay world prior to World War II which was more open, more publicly visible, and to a degree even more accepted than later generations of homosexual Americans would experience. This is both a history and a reclamation project.

There are a handful of themes underlying this broad account. In dealing with these concepts, Chauncey first explains that the terms we now use to discuss gay people and gay culture would not apply to this era. People in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not make the clear distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals. They did, on the other hand, make a distinction between "fairies" (or "pansies" in later decades of the time frame covered), who were men for whom "homosexuality" was determined not by sexual preference but by gender behavior; a man was a "fairy" if he behaved in an effeminate manner; his preference for having sexual relations with other men was secondary, or rather a "by-product", so to speak, of his feminine gendered behavior. Therefore, the men who had sex with them were not necessarily considered "gay" in the modern sense, as they played the role of the gendered male in the relationship. The "rough" trade referred to the "normal" men who sought "fairies" or were sought out by them.

"Queers" were another subset of gays; they were marked by a more subdued public persona, and a tendency to distinguish themselves from the fairies. While fairies tended to seek out the "rough" trade for sexual partners, queers very often sought out romantic and sexual relationships with other queers. And it is worth noting at this point--this book is a story about gay men, not homosexuals in general. Chauncey explains this choice for two reasons. First, standard gender roles for all people at the time strictly limited the autonomy and freedom of movement women had compared to men, so that the world that lesbians moved in was different, and more restricted, than the "Gay New York", which coexisted within the geographic space of "normal" New York, in which gay men negotiated their own lives. Secondly, as noted above the concept of "homosexuality" was not yet defined, so that there was not yet the perceived commonality of interests between gay men and lesbians which later generations would acknowledge.

In general, Chauncey argues that acceptance of gay men was more common in immigrant and working-class communities than in middle-class and Anglo-American culture. The general narrative of the book, in fact, builds from this beginning towards the Prohibition era when gay culture found a more welcoming home in "proper" society as one consequence of the Volstead Act driving nightlife "underground" (sometimes literally, as in the case of many speakeasies) so that middle- and upper-class patrons ended up rubbing shoulders with organized crime figures, for example, while patronizing clubs that commodified the "exotic" by offering a sanitized look at African-American or homosexual life in places like, respectively, the Cotton Club and the Pansy Club.

The backlash against this brief era of acceptance and even celebration of openly gay behavior and unapologetic gay men came to an end with the close of Prohibition and the beginning the Great Depression. The utilization of liquor licensing as a tool of state control drove gay bars underground and gay people themselves to hide their identities more than they had in previous decades. By the time the late 1960's rolled around, the invisibility of gay people and the demonization of homosexuality had come to seem both normal and permanent. The fact that previous generations had known a very different gay New York was largely forgotten outside of the gay community itself.