Still Seeing Red: How the Cold War Shapes the New American Politics

Professor White (an ironic name of author, for those who know their Russian civil war) has written an overall good account of American cultural and political perceptions during the cold war. The thoroughness of his research gives him the four stars, but the fifth is withheld because, I feel, his focus is much too narrow. Instead of the cold war shaping American values, a broader glance at the historical record shows that it was American values that shaped the cold war. There is a straight line of continuity from McCarthyism to the Red Scare of 1920, and beyond that to the anti-IWW scare prior to WWI and the anti-anarchist craze in the wake of the Chicago Haymarket bombing of 1886. Linked to the anti-radical rhetoric were not only powerful business interests and their militant anti-labor stand, but even longer currents of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothingism - as well as perennial racism and white supremacy. Thus Professor White also does not dig deeper analytically, to ask WHY America is anti-Communist. He is content to take the formulation of "liberal American values" vs. Communist totalitarianism pretty much at face value. Those of us who lived through the period will agree, like it or not, that despite the liberal rhetoric anti-Communism served to protect deeply conservative, even reactionary values. Like "anti-terrorism" now, with its Patriot Act, anti-Communism served to criminalize dissent. Thus Martin Luther King could be seriously branded a "Communist agent" by the supreme national policeman, J. Edgar Hoover; or anti-war protestors were labeled "un-American traitors" for disagreeing with their government; or Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe could find shelter in the U.S. as seekers of freedom from Captive Nations; or branding non-alignment of Third World nations "the same as Communism," justifying old patterns of conquest in new guise; that discrimination, blacklisting, and clandestine surveillance in violation of the most fundamental liberal principles were justified in the name of "defending freedom"; or how this defense of freedom was intimately linked to the rising profits of the military-industrial complex and the oil industry. Professor White is right in his title: America is "still seeing red." The Cold War lives on in the rhetoric of Dubya Bush and his Washington Politburo. But without America's long legacy of anti-radicalism, knee-jerk conservatism, and anti-intellectualism, the post-WW II Cold War era itself could not have been possible.