"Politics in an Age of Anxiety":
Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960

K. A. Cuordileone

In a 1955 essay on the "radical right" as a force in American politics, the sociologist Daniel Bell complained about the "polarization of images" to which much political discourse had succumbed. "In these strange times," he wrote, "new polar terms have been introduced into political discourse, but surely none so strange as the division into 'hard' and 'soft.'" As Bell explained, "presumably one is 'soft' if one insists that the danger from domestic Communists is small," while one is "hard" if one holds that "no distinction can be made between international and domestic Communism." Objecting to such stark dichotomies, Bell stressed that liberals had long affirmed an anticommunist politics and were taking conservative positions on traditional economic issues. In the end, however, he could only lament that "an amorphous, ideological issue," rather than an "interest-group issue," had become "a major dividing line in the political community." "The only issue is whether one is 'hard' or 'soft.'"1	1
In retrospect it appears that Bell was speaking to a striking feature of the political culture of his time: the reduction of political positions to dualistic images—images that often superseded a policy-oriented politics and obscured the extent of the political consensus that was emerging. Yet the rhetorical polarities he pointed to had entered Cold War political discourse long before the radical right made its mark on the political scene in the early fifties, charging liberal Democrats with softness on Communism. The hard/soft dichotomy structured Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s classic 1949 statement of liberal anticommunism, The Vital Center, a seminal book whose language and imagery, in the words of Garry Wills, "set up the desired contrasts for a decade."2	2
If Bell failed to appreciate how much liberals had indulged in—perhaps even initiated—the "polarization of images" he found characteristic of right-wing rhetoric, he also left precisely what was "strange" about such imagery unexamined. An emotionally driven "symbolic" politics had supplanted a politics based on "normal intramural interest conflicts," he stressed. Yet Bell, a pioneer of the symbolist approach to the study of political life, had no inclination to pursue—nor any real category for analyzing—a phenomenon whose sources and meanings may transcend the "status anxieties" or "status politics" that he and others attributed to the radical right.3	3
This article is concerned with what Bell had difficulty identifying: an excessive preoccupation with—and anxiety about—masculinity in early Cold War American politics. The "polarization of images" he pointed to reflects a political culture that put a new premium on hard masculine toughness and rendered anything less than that soft and feminine and, as such, a real or potential threat to the security of the nation. The power of the hard/soft opposition in political discourse lay here, in the gendered symbolic baggage that gave such imagery meaning and resonance. And in the tense climate of Cold War politics, that discourse grew increasingly shrill, at times bizarre. The strange rhetoric that often supplanted substantive debate in the political arena did indeed involve "an amorphous, ideological issue"—Communism. What remains unexplored are the sources of the hard/soft preoccupation and the kind of symbolic politics born of it. A closer analysis reveals a politics that relied on a complex of sexually-charged dualisms; for cultural as well as political reasons, those dualisms imprisoned the discourse of the era and as a result impoverished its politics. By exploring the nexus between cultural and political life in the 1940s and 1950s, we can begin to understand why and how an exaggerated cult of masculine toughness and virility surfaced in American political culture, at least until events and upheavals in the 1960s helped defuse its worst excesses and reconfigure the political landscape.	4
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