Music and News on the Home Front
Production of goods was not the only thing that was controlled by the government during the war. The Office of War Information (OWI) was created in June 1942 to act as the official government war censor. Its major purpose was to regulate the media to sell the war to citizens. It gathered data and controlled […]
Entertaining the Troops
The entertainment industry did its part to support the war effort, primarily through USO (United Service Organizations for National Defense) tours states-side and to the Europe and Pacific combat theatres – “across jungle, sea or desert, wherever men fight the war.” Bob Hope was probably the most active of the Hollywood performers who donated their […]
The Cold War: Nuclear Deterrence and Containment
Two developments in the post-World War II years coincided to shape the zeitgeist of the entire era. The two factors were the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power with its aggressive doctrine of the expansion of international communism along with the availability of nuclear weapons. These factors lead to a paranoia that […]
The Atomic Scare
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a result of the atomic bombs was beyond imagination. (See Hiroshima, by John Hersey, for his description of the lives of six survivors before, during and after the bombing. “… [T]heir faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run […]
The Berlin Airlift
One of the earliest Cold War confrontations involved the divided city of Berlin. In June 1948, in an effort to squeeze the Western countries out of the city, Russia cut off road access to Berlin, preventing American aid from reaching the city. America decided to defeat this Russian blockade by flying supplies into the city’s […]
The Korean “Police Action”
Western satisfaction over “winning” the Berlin Blockade was short-lived. After the end of WW II, there was a civil war in China between the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-Shek, who were supported by the United States, and the communist forces of Mao Zedong, who were supported by Russia. In October 1949, Mao’s forces defeated the […]
The Red Scare, The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), McCarthyism and Blacklisting
In keeping with the New Deal, there was more tolerance of liberalism in the United States during the 1930s. Sometimes based on altruistic ideas of common good, improvement of the working class or other acceptable intellectual concepts such as anti-fascism, and sometimes based on more pragmatic considerations, such as a solution to the perceived failures […]
The House Un-American Activities Committee and Other Examples of The Red Scare
Although there was tolerance of liberal and progressive causes in the 1930s, fear of Communist subversion dated back to post-World War I days and the Palmer raids: “… [P]ersecution of ‘Reds’ had plenty of precedents in this nation’s history. As early as 1798, [the Alien and Sedition] laws were enacted that defined ‘enemy aliens’ and […]
Senator Joseph McCarthy, McCarthyism and Red Hunting
Between 1950 and 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican Senator from Wisconsin and a member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), unleashed one of the most notorious witch hunts in American history. It started with a speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in January 1950. He told those in attendance that […]
Blacklisting
Public personalities, who were alleged to be associated with anything or anyone suspected to be sympathetic to communism, were likely to be blacklisted and banned from their performing jobs. The “Hollywood 10” was a group of writers and artists in the entertainment industry, who were supposed to be communists, who were using movies to create […]