Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christian G. Appy, editor. Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966. (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War.) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 340. Cloth $60.00, paper $18.95.

It is no longer news that, in recent years, culture and ideology have grown into powerful paradigms for the explanation of American foreign relations. "Core values," "cultural anxieties," "perception theory," and other explanatory patterns borrowed from the rhetoric of cultural studies and sociology have expanded the study of diplomacy to include, among other subjects, the influence of nongovernmental special interest groups and individuals on the decision-making process and the effect of foreign policy on popular culture. Both books under consideration here reflect this trend.	1
John Fousek analyzes the state of American public opinion in the early Cold War. Based on extensive research of "white-controlled" newspapers and political magazines, as well as the records of the African-American, labor, and, marginally, the women's press, Fousek refutes the assumption that the Truman administration along with the ruling elite manipulated a peaceful postwar society into a warmongering country ridden by anticommunism. Such efforts would have been superfluous, Fousek writes, because public opinion showed traces of expansive superpatriotism long before the governmental propaganda—including Winston Churchill's Fulton speech and the Truman Doctrine—targeted anticommunism and containment. Emerging from World War II convinced that the nation had a mission "to lead the free world," to feed and clothe the needy, and to represent an example of moral integrity, the American people already constituted Truman's loyal supporters. The ideology of greatness and globalism, Fousek stresses, penetrated not just the press but all of public opinion and popular culture, as an abundance of letters to Congress and the president as well advertising samples prove. The only exception came from the African-American press (which doubted American leadership abroad in the face of racial inequality at home) and labor (badly fractured by the internal discord over U.S. foreign policy).	2
The picture changed somewhat when Soviet-American frictions intensified, and the globe became divided into two worlds, one communist, one democratic. The global surge of communism exacerbated the domestic discussions over racial and economic inequality at home. The African-American press, more so than labor, utilized the debate to stress its own demands for civil rights, and what seemed like a peripheral argument in 1945 resonated powerfully with the public in 1949 to the extent that it threatened to break the multipartisan consensus over American leadership. But the rise of anticommunism saved the ideology of national greatness and global responsiblity. "By explaining why the United State was having such a difficult time meeting its global responsibilities while simultaneously buttressing the nation's claims to greatness, anticommunism put the whole ideology in working order," Fousek writes. "The third leg enabled the triad to stand" (p. 189).	3
This is a highly thought-provoking book that offers a number of debatable arguments. Fousek's claim that the appeal of anticommunism rested on its ability to support the doctrine of global responsibility seems questionable in light of what other scholars have written about the persistence of a Red Scare since the early 1900s. In the same vein, one might wish that the author had grappled a bit more profoundly with the theoretical implications of public opinion research, much of which has been contested over the years. Most importantly, did these newspapers and journals influence or reflect public opinion, and to what extent did they affect the policy making process? On a less important note, Fousek's enthusiasm with the material he found occasionally makes for tedious reading when he presents an abundance of quotes where one would have done the job. All this said, this volume fulfills precisely the requirement of a good book. It raises more questions than it can answer and decenters the political analysis of Cold War propaganda.	. . .