The Liberal State on Trial

Jonathan Bell. The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years.
Columbia University Press, 2004.

Bell argues that the existence of an ideological threat from the far left during the early Cold War not only determined the course and development of foreign policy--or even of domestic politics (as Mary Dudziak has argued), it also limited the potential for left-wing social democratic politics. Bell agrees with historical accounts which stress the emphasis that Cold War liberalism placed on individual civil rights; his contention is that while other scholars have stressed the institutional limitations of New Deal liberalism or the ideological value of addressing state-level segregation and other violations of civil rights through legislative and judicial means, it was in fact the rise of anti-statism in American political discourse during the Truman era which ultimately restricted the ability of liberals to embrace or even flirt with left-of-center politics at any level. The Cold War created a domestic political climate in which the specter of being anywhere on the left was toxic. Liberalism survived by embracing the language of anti-statism; which in turn limited the degree to which liberals could defend the previous Popular Front accomplishments of the New Deal state and CIO unionism.

This is also, in some ways, a partial history of the rise of the new Right, as conservatives slowly learned over the course of the several election years studied here, how effective the language of anti-statism was. By attacking their opponents as either left-wing sympathizers themselves or as merely dupes of world Communism, Republicans and conservatives were able to put liberal defenders of the New Deal and the Fair Deal on the defensive, while also pushing the latter to embrace rhetoric which might have made tactical sense but which undermined the legitimacy of the liberalism they were tied to. Ultimately, only be embracing anti-statism as vigorously as their opposition could liberals hope to survive by 1952, which was the peak of this strand of new political culture.

The Straight State

Margot Canday. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.
Princeton University Press, 2009.

Canady argues that because the American national state was late in developing--specifically, because (unlike Western European states) it formed after the "discovery" of  homosexuality by sexologists in the late nineteenth century (2)--the state itself took a leading role in creating a definition of homosexuality as part of the larger process of defining citizenship and policing the borders of the latter. As she admits in the conclusion, the result is a study which necessarily has little to say about the suffering and injustice suffered by an unknown number of Americans, resident aliens, and immigrants who were--or were suspected of--"homosexuality" as it was (often ill-) defined by various agencies and individual bureaucrats. On the other hand, what this study lacks in terms of the perspective of those who felt the brunt of state power, it makes up for in its nuanced and focused examination of how "the State" was actually personified by the individuals responsible for articulating and interpreting policy and law at the level of implementation.

Canady argues for the slow development of a binary notion of citizenship along the axis of sexuality; by the 1960's, the state had defined people as either heterosexuals or homosexuals, with the latter being unworthy of full citizenship. The development of this binary was a long process--while many historical accounts date the Federal codification of homophobia to the McCarthy era, Canady argues that the Cold War "lavender scare" was rather the culmination of a much longer process dating back to turn-of-the-century attempts to control immigration, then growing with the mobilization of World War I and later the rise of the New Deal State, finally culminating in World War II. The Second World War, unlike the First, lasted long enough so that the inclusion of a significant percentage of the population in the military created an imperative to determine the "fitness" of Americans and their sexual behavior and adherence to gender norms. The mechanisms created to police this would, like the military-industrial complex itself, survive the end of the war, where they would be further refined and institutionalized to meet the ideological aims of the Cold War state.

The hard-and-fast binary nature of Canady's analysis might be a little too pat, but her emphasis on how notions of homosexuality were intertwined with notions of defining citizenship in conjunction with the rise of the state is interesting. Her insight that there was an inversion built in to the liberal state--that the Federal government took the lead in pushing back against state and local laws limiting racial civil rights while simultaneously creating limitations on homosexual rights--is interesting as well.

The Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers. Age of Fracture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Despite the partisan nature of Presidential politics, the Cold War era saw the rise of a over-arching style of Presidential rhetoric which was broadly shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. The era of what Rodgers seems to define (although never explicitly names) as the era of the Cold War Presidency came to a rhetorical end during the early years of Reagan's time in office. Reagan removed the agency of presidential action and the language of shared national sacrifice from his speeches; instead, he increasingly moved away from concrete considerations of domestic and international challenges towards vague, cinematic expressions of timeless aspiration and limitless projections of the nation's capacity for greatness (however defined).

After noting this shift in rhetoric, Rodgers states that Reagan was reflecting rather than driving broader social and cultural shifts. The rest of the book casts a wide net--regarding race, gender, power, and more--creating a portrait of a society fragmenting into ever-morphing and re-shifting segments and strata. The certainties of the Cold War and the foundations of post-New Deal liberalism all fell apart in the wake of the upheavals and intellectual ferment of the late 60's.

Much of this is framed in the context of the rise of market-based thinking; essentially, the language and values of free-market capitalism seeped into the discourse of sociopolitical thinking, either driving or at the least exacerbating the fragmentation of society in the final three decades of the 20th century. Rodgers teases out a dizzying array of intellectual trends and developments, but the triumph of "the market" over any consensual basis for what "society" might be is the unifying idea running through the seemingly disparate chapters.

One Nation, Under God

Kevin M. Kruse. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. 
Basic Books, 2015.

Most Americans are aware that "In God We Trust" was adopted as the National Motto in the 1950's; many are also aware that the phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the same period. Most accounts have assumed that these changes--and the increased religiosity in political and public life in general--were primarily a product of the Cold War, as American political and social leaders sought to amplify the contrast with the official atheist Communist bloc. But in Kruse's telling, the fusion of faith and conservative politics predated the Cold War. Instead, he traces the origins of the myth of a "Christian America" all the way back before World War II. The rise of what would later become the religious Right was birthed in corporate America, in deep-seated opposition to the liberalism of the Roosevelt years.

Kruse's account locates the center of the rise of the religious Right neither in specific denominations nor even among a particular cadre of politicians (not at first, anyway), but rather in the private sector. First these anti-New Deal corporate interests found common cause with a select group of charismatic and influential ministers like Billy Graham, the push to bring overt religiosity into the Federal government; then they found a willing and able agent in the person of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared many of the same values but who failed to utilize the creation of civic religiosity towards the specifically libertarian ends many of his sponsors had hoped to see. On the other hand, his tendency towards vagueness and ideologically-neutral religiosity created a sort of "civic deism" which would give the use of religious language and iconography a permanent home in Washington.

It was up to Billy Graham and Richard Nixon to finish the job of making Republican control of the White House an explicitly religious (and Christian) endeavor. By that point, the nascent religious Right was focused more on the rise of the counterculture and the tumult of the 1960's rather than the economics of the post-New Deal state. Communism was an oft-quoted foe, but it was the fear of domestic fellow-travelers and presumed creeping socialism from within which was the real bogeyman. The language of the Cold War served to validate and institutionalize a process that had begun decades earlier.