To Lead the Free World

American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War

John Fousek

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807860670
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this cultural history of the origins of the Cold War, John Fousek argues boldly that American nationalism provided the ideological glue for the broad public consensus that supported U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era. From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, the United States waged cold war against the Soviet Union not primarily in the name of capitalism or Western civilization--neither of which would have united the American people behind the cause--but in the name of America. Through close readings of sources that range from presidential speeches and popular magazines to labor union debates and the African American press, Fousek shows how traditional nationalist ideas about national greatness, providential mission, and manifest destiny influenced postwar public culture and shaped U.S. foreign policy discourse during the crucial period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Korean War. Ultimately, he says, in the atmosphere created by apparently unceasing international crises, Americans rallied around the flag, eventually coming to equate national loyalty with global anticommunism and an interventionist foreign policy.

Chapter 1: The Moment of Victory

For many Americans, the end of World War II came more swiftly than expected, appearing suddenly with the enormous, mushroomlike clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan’s defeat had been within grasp for weeks. But on August 6, 1945, victory became palpable, as the United States unleashed a new weapon so awesome that Japanese surrender seemed the necessary consequence of its use. According to public opinion polls in August 1945, a large majority of Americans approved the use of atomic bombs against Japan. They did so because they believed the bomb had hastened the war’s end and their nation’s victory. In other words, they believed what President Harry S. Truman and his administration told them.¹

Despite fears and anxieties concerning the atomic bomb itself, the end of the war brought most Americans a sense of relief and national pride.² The American way of life had survived the challenge of total war against totalitarian foes. At this moment of victory, nationalist sentiments suffused all corners of U.S. public life, including the widespread talk of international cooperation. An essentially nationalistic construction of the moment of victory set the parameters for public understanding of the main purposes of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era.

By announcing the war’s end and the events that led up to it, and by subsequently proclaiming national days of celebration and prayer, President Truman helped to shape that moment. In Truman’s public pronouncements, the victory signified the greatness of the United States, the righteousness of its cause, and the guidance that God granted the nation. The victory of the United States and its allies over the forces of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese militarists, the president emphasized, demonstrated “the basic proposition of the worth and dignity of man”—of the individual as master rather than servant of the state. The mass media echoed these themes. The Truman administration and the media alike construed the victory as belonging primarily to the United States rather than to all the Allies equally.³ In the official discourse and in the mass culture, the nation’s righteousness stood beyond question. Yet some voices in the national discussion did question both the completeness of the victory and the righteousness of the nation. Those voices included members of a peace movement shriveled by the wartime consensus, small numbers of independent leftists and conservative nationalists, and others who had opposed U.S. entry into the war to begin with. But the strongest chorus of voices to question the triumphalist view of America’s victory issued from the African American press.⁴

THE ATOMIC MOMENT

The first public disclosure of the atomic bomb came in a terse written statement issued by President Truman August 6, 1945, the day the bomb was unleashed on the people of Hiroshima. The president described a weapon possessing “more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’,” previously the largest bomb ever used. Yet comparison to other merely human efforts was insufficient, both in scale and in drama. Truman stressed that the atomic bomb was “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.” The United States, he told his listeners, had mastered “the force from which the sun draws its power” and unleashed it “against those who brought war to the Far East.”⁵ How, then, could Japan or any foe resist America’s will?

While acknowledging British cooperation, the president emphasized that this remarkable achievement was made possible by the unique know-how, material abundance, and physical security of the United States. The technical feat itself, Truman suggested, was a national triumph of historic magnitude: “We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won.”⁶ Such world-historical superlatives recurred throughout the president’s brief statement. “What has been done,” he assured his constituents, “is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”⁷ If Japan’s leaders still failed to accept “unconditional surrender,” he warned, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”⁸ The unequaled rain of ruin Japan had already experienced, in the form of the “conventional” U.S. aerial assault, went unmentioned.

Before Hiroshima, the U.S. press had conveyed some sense of the enormity of the ongoing air war against Japan, but it treated the atomic bomb as a new departure in destructiveness.⁹ The New York Daily News, the nation’s best-selling newspaper and a staunch booster for U.S. air power, amplified Truman’s view of the new weapon’s vast significance. On August 7, the top half of the tabloid’s front page spelled it out in big, bold print: “Atomic Bomb Spells Japs’ Ruin: Truman.”¹⁰ As one Washington correspondent described the mood in the nation’s capital, “For forty-eight hours now, the new bomb has been virtually the only topic of conversation and discussion. ... For two days it has been an unusual thing to see a smile among the throngs that crowd the streets. The entire city is pervaded by a kind of sense of oppression.”¹¹

But to many Americans the bomb brought a sense of relief as well, because it signaled the imminence of the war’s end. The week of the surrender, for example, Life magazine published a powerful photo-essay featuring the surreal, billowing clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, under a title that implicitly equated the bomb with the peace: “The War Ends: Burst of Atomic Bomb Brings Swift Surrender of Japanese.”¹² Even in the days immediately following its debut, public discussion of the atomic bomb focused less on its use against Japan than on its meaning for the nascent postwar world and America’s place in it. Japan’s defeat and America’s victory were taken as givens, as though both eventualities were embedded in the official news releases concerning Hiroshima. The bomb itself “spells Japs’ ruin,” as the News’s headline put it. The media presented this atomic triumph as more than simply a triumph against Japan. One news story, for example, reported that “Congressional sources” believed the bomb “puts [the] USSR virtually in the position now of an also ran.”¹³ The bomb gave the United States incontestable power over all actual and potential adversaries.

In its August 8 editorial, “The Split Atom,” the Daily News argued that the bomb would be essential to American security for the foreseeable future. Noting that Canada held the greatest known deposits of the necessary uranium, the editorial concluded that this northern neighbor and World War II ally “should make itself our out-and-out and exclusive ally” in terms of its uranium trade. In such matters, the News asserted, “it is a question of kill or be killed in wartime, and of lining up the best possible weapons in peacetime lest others line them up against us and in due time deal us a Pearl Harbor.” Ignoring Truman’s vague appeal about controlling the spread and use of the new weapon, the News called for controlling the necessary resource to ensure a perpetual preponderance of U.S. atomic power, even if the existing atomic monopoly could not be maintained. Canada should realize that U.S. interests were its interests as well. If not, the News suggested, “enough patriotic Americans can probably be found to see to it that Canada does the right thing by us and by itself with its uranium,” possibly by threatening it with atomic bombs. Though the Pacific War was not yet over, this editorial, like most post-Hiroshima discourse, concerned itself primarily with the postwar security of the United States. The victory over Japan was more or less in hand, and the commonplace “lesson” of Pearl Harbor—that eternal vigilance is the price of peace, as the saying goes—was taken as the most reliable guide to the postwar future.

On the same page, an editorial cartoon entitled “The Family” amplified one aspect of the editorial’s basic theme. The drawing depicted an affluent white couple, probably in their forties, leisurely reading their morning paper in the shade of a glorious old elm or oak. She holds the paper, bearing the banner headline “First Atom Bomb Falls on Hiroshima,” and says to him “This atom bomb seems to be the most terrific instrument of destruction ever invented.” “Yes,” he replies, “and let’s use it on our enemies first instead of our enemies using it on us.” By this means, the proverbial American Way of Life, which this couple seems to represent, is to be preserved against any and all adversaries. The self-assurance of this obviously successful man no doubt served to discourage doubt in those who might think otherwise.¹⁴

Other editorial cartoons revealed less sanguine views of the bomb. Two revealing cartoons from the Newark Evening News appeared in the first weeks of the atomic age. One depicted a powerful forearm labeled “Control of Atomic Power” struggling to wrest the globe from the grip of a huge, ape-man monster labeled “Future Threat of War.” The other depicted a roundtable of United Nations diplomats in the guise of an enormous scale weighed down to one side by a tiny ball representing “atomic power”; a giant globe hung in the balance. Another cartoon that appeared within days of the atomic bombings showed a geeky-looking scientist (glasses, white lab jacket, a slip of paper in his pocket marked “The Atom”) standing over an arc of the globe revealing the Americas and a crawling infant identified as “Humanity.” The man held out a tiny ball in his extended hand, and the caption posed a question: “Baby play with nice ball?” Unlike the Daily News, these cartoonists saw the bomb less as a sign of American power than as a symbol of world vulnerability. But they instantly grasped its global implications, as well as the speed with which it spelled the end of the war and the beginning of a dangerous new era.¹⁵

Palpable though it was, the final, total victory remained to be realized. Public anticipation of the war’s denouement continued to grow until August 14, when Truman announced that Japan’s surrender met U.S. demands. In the intervening days, this rising anticipation produced waves of nervous energy throughout the nation. For several consecutive days before the surrender was accepted, for example, crowds gathered in New York’s Times Square and other public spaces, awaiting triumphant celebrations that people evidently felt were in the air.¹⁶

THE PRESIDENT REPORTS

In the nine-day span from the bombing of Hiroshima to the announcement of Japan’s surrender, President Truman repeatedly fed the anticipation of victory while shaping the meaning that victory would assume in the nation’s public life. On August 9, most notably, Truman delivered a “radio report to the American people” that proved pivotal in influencing public discussion of the war’s end and of America’s role in the emerging, postwar international order. The bulk of the speech discussed the situation in Europe and the results of the Potsdam Conference in Berlin, from which Truman had just returned. But Truman also discussed the state of the war against Japan, the significance of the atomic bomb, and the new position of the United States in a changed world.

Truman starkly portrayed the ravages he had seen in Europe. He described Berlin, “the city from which the Germans intended to rule the world,” as “a ghost city.” He described haunting scenes in the ruins of other devastated German cities, where “women and children and old men were wandering over the highways, returning to bombed-out homes or leaving bombed-out cities, searching for food and shelter.” Truman spoke also of the “terrific destruction” he had seen in Western Europe and England. The images of war-torn Europe—of a land “in ruins,” of people wandering in despair amid their bombed-out communities—were all familiar enough to the American public by August 1945. They had become stock phrases in any discussion of the war, employed recurrently in the press, on the radio and elsewhere. But by using these phrases to express his own first-hand observations, the president invested them with the full symbolic weight of his office.¹⁷

After sketching this picture of Europe in ruins, the president gave thanks to God for the well-being of the United States, and expressed a sense of urgency concerning the need to protect the nation against any future war:

How glad I am to be home again! And how grateful to Almighty God that this land of ours has been spared!

We must do all we can to spare her from the ravages of any future breach of the peace. That is why, though the United States wants no territory or profit or selfish advantage out of this war, we are going to maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.

This passage reflects important elements of American “internationalist” thought in the 1940s, but it also conveys strong nationalist sentiments. By proclaiming his pleasure at returning home, especially against the bleak European backdrop he had sketched, Truman voiced the love of country so essential to war talk in any nation-state. By bringing God into the equation, he delivered a classic formulation of what Conor Cruise O’Brien has called “holy nationalism,” implying that God had chosen to spare America from war’s devastation.¹⁸ Most tellingly, the nationalism Truman espoused here was self-consciously benevolent and “disinterested,” characteristics typical of, though hardly unique to, American nationalism. The self-conscious denial of self-aggrandizement runs far back in the tradition of American nationalist thought and was accentuated in the twentieth century with the renunciation of landed expansionism, particularly in the rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.¹⁹

Still, no matter how selfless the United States proclaimed itself, Americans had to take action to ensure that God’s will would be realized. The act of acquiring military bases, for instance, involved no selfish desire because it was entirely defensive, benevolent, and necessary to realize God’s will. In the same August 9 speech, Truman presented U.S. interests and world peace as concentric circles, if not identical spheres. Speaking in the national voice of the United States, the president declared that the United States would acquire whatever bases “our military experts” think necessary “for our protection.” Yet these acquisitions would be “consistent with the United Nations Charter,” Truman promised, voicing a central precept of the internationalist mantle he had inherited from Roosevelt.

Truman proceeded to assert the increasingly commonplace notion that any future war would wreak devastation of unimaginable magnitude, dwarfing the horrors of the present conflict. The possibility of unforeseeable destruction from which the United States might not be spared served as the core of Truman’s evocation of the spirit and purpose of the United Nations. National self-interest, or the concept of national security, clearly underlay the language of international cooperation.

After these introductory remarks, Truman explained the results of the Potsdam Conference, including military arrangements related to the Soviet declaration of war against Japan and the political and economic principles by which the Allies would govern occupied Germany. These principles, Truman said, “seek to rebuild democracy by control of German education, by reorganizing local government and the judiciary, by encouraging free speech, free press, freedom of religion, and the right of labor to organize.” The president summarized the broadest aims of the occupation in even bolder terms: “We are going to do what we can to make Germany over into a decent nation, so that it may eventually work its way from the economic chaos it has brought upon itself, back into a place in the civilized world.”²⁰ Within the dual contexts of the entire speech and the broader tradition of discourse about America’s world role of which the speech is a part, the voice in this passage appears ambiguous. On the one hand, Truman’s use of “we” clearly seems intended to speak for the occupying powers collectively, since it immediately follo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Moment of Victory
• Chapter 2: The Meaning of Victory
• Chapter 3: The Meaning of Global Responsibility
• Visual Essay: The Globe as American Icon
• Chapter 4: From One World into Two
• Chapter 5: Defining “Free World” Leadership
• Chapter 6: Limited War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index