You might want to take a look this old LA Times column on the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, and the “McCarthy witch hunt” of the 1950s. The irony is that in each of these cases the liberals were wrong. The Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were, in fact, Soviet agents and worked against American interests. Hollywood, too, was full not just of soft-hearted pinkos but of actual Soviet agents. You could and should disagree with Joe McCarthy’s tactics but there was a genuine problem. It wasn’t so much a case of a witch hunt as of overzealous prosecution.
Watched the Grapes of Wrath with my daughter last week, and pointed out to her that this was a controversial movie in its day which got the writer and director investigated as Reds. The ideological concept seems to allude her since they haven’t gotten to the post WWII era yet, but she is prosecuting Sacco and Vanzetti today in a mock trial with no remorse.
Well, McCarthy was dead wrong about everything. The Red Scare appears completely disconnected from the reality of the Soviets, regardless of the guilt of the Rosenbergs and Hiss. The Communist idealists were gone by the end of the 40s. The State Department did not lose China because of Soviet subversion or whatever the hell they thought. And Hollywood? The only films that stand out now as propaganda are the I Married A Communists. Whatever the Soviets did, it’s totally irrelevant.
It’s interesting to compare American paranoia to the lack of it in England, which was genuinely subverted by Soviet agents. Anthony Blunt turned out to be a spy and no one cared at all, it seems. Or France, where Stalinist doctrine went through Sartre and unions followed orders from Moscow (until 68). That’s concrete. American fears were about the ephemeral and random, which is something that has not changed.
Nuclear weapons had a lot to do with the fear of Soviet subversion. By the 50s it was clear that outright war with the USSR could not happen. Everyone (mostly) affirmed it but for a certain type of person, however much they accepted reality it was unacceptable. Having an enemy who you can not go to war against, ever–it’s almost as if the enemy is inside you.
MM: I guess it depends on your definition of propaganda. I thought the Grapes of Wrath was propaganda. The story is highly manipulative towards a political end or at least promoting agitation. Perhaps all stories are manipulative in that the writer is seeking to create a response in the consumer. I suppose I found parts of the movie were a bit ham-handed in promoting a political message.
By the 50s it was clear that outright war with the USSR could not happen.
This differs from the history I know. Guess I’m slipping into alternate realities again. So, in this reality, how much less did the sides spend on nuclear war prep? In mine, both sides spent fuck-all amounts prepping for it. The amount of money and technical expertise put into submarine warfare alone was incredible!
Remember when Reagan outlawed Russia forever?
In mine, both sides spent fuck-all amounts prepping for it.
Bureaucrats lining their own pockets while building bigger mazes. Don’t worry kids–occasionally it got to bomb a third-world country and kill 2 million citizens or invade Afghanistan or a helpless client state. Other than that, back to filling out the forms!
Remember when Reagan outlawed Russia forever?
Yeah, those were good times….
And good to meet someone from one of the other realities. Given how cranky they are here, I think we had more fun in ours.
I can only guess that MM hasn’t seen many movies. Here’s a partial list of some of the most blatant pro-Soviet American-made propaganda films:
Song of Russia
Three Russian Girls
Days of Glory
The North Star
They weren’t obscure. They were all major studio productions. And that’s just off the top of my head. The most obscure of those is Three Russian Girls and I’ve only seen that because it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Don’t worry kids–occasionally it got to bomb a third-world country and kill 2 million citizens….
Where did the US kill two million people? That’s a lot of people. That’s Pol Pot levels of people, or two and a half Rwandas, or about 40% of the Great African Wars. How did we kill them? Bombs? Conventional or nuclear? Did we use biological weapons? Or did we just line ’em up and shoot them? That would explain the ammunition shortage I was hearing about. (Hadn’t realized I was in an alternate reality then.)
DEFINITELY had more fun in our reality….
What about Reds? Or that Michael Moore film about how wonderful Castro’s Cuba is? Do you have Michael Moore here? Slovenly rich fat white man who complains about how awful fat rich white people (especially the men) are?
PD:
Sentiment, clumsiness, and manipulation are hallmarks of popular art. Either you should be offended by all of it or none of it.
For example, you could have a bad movie about the noble suffering of those who were convicted and killed in the 1937 show trials. It could be terrible, filled with wooden speeches about evil and flawed utopias, but it would be based, like Grapes of Wrath, on a real event. Highbrow aesthetes would have mocked it and Stalinists would have called it propaganda because it told the truth about the show trials.
If you haven’t read John Reed’s book Ten Days That Shook the World, I strongly recommend you do. It’s the book that Reds was based on.
Dave,
All four were also released when the Soviet Union was our ally.
What’s your point?
The civilian dead in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is way over 2 million. I was being generous to America.
The civilian dead in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is way over 2 million. I was being generous to America.
So the only civilians killed in those wars were killed by Americans. No doubt by John Kerry and the other Winter Soldiers. Got it.
Hey! That means the US killed 70,000,000 million people during WWII! Wow, we really are bad mother fuckers!
What’s your point?
That it doesn’t prove there were Soviet agents in Hollywood. And it doesn’t prove the daffiness of the idea that there would be agents in Hollywood trying to subvert American freedom rather than trying to make popular movies on a budget.
The North Star
Yeah, I’m sure any script by Lillian Hellman wouldn’t have been pro-Soviet pro-Stalin except for the fact that they were US allies at the time!
Hey! That means the US killed 70,000,000 million people during WWII! Wow, we really are bad mother fuckers!
It’s 2015. It’s time to admit that minus American involvement in Indochina there would not be have anywhere near the numbers of people who died there. By anywhere near, I mean millions. There would have been one commie Vietnam. If that strikes you as terrible, and a worse outcome than what really occurred, then own the dead and stop pretending.
Yeah, those were good times:
Sting: I hope the Russians love their children too.
Oh, for goodness sake, read a book sometime, MM! That Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, that the Rosenbergs were Soviet agents, that the American Communist Party was funded directly by the Kremlin, that its leaders were Soviet agents, and that there were Soviet agents in Hollywood are all documented in the Soviet archives which came out some time ago. There’s evidence from that side, testimony from this side. How much evidence do you need? You just have to accept it. It’s really not open for debate anymore.
Dave,
I’m totally aware that Hiss and the Rosenbergs were spies, and never said that they weren’t. I just find it amusing that the guilt of Hiss and the Rosenbergs is being used to justify the limitless paranoia embodied in being terrified of communist subversion. Seriously–what exactly were Ring Lardner or Dalton Trumbo going to do as committed Soviet agents?
Don’t forget Klaus Fuchs, even if he was a Limey Kraut and not an American.
I just find it amusing that the guilt of Hiss and the Rosenbergs is being used to justify the limitless paranoia embodied in being terrified of communist subversion.
When there’s actual Communist subversion going on, it’s pretty clear that being worried about Communist subversion is NOT paranoia.
If that strikes you as terrible, and a worse outcome than what really occurred, then own the dead and stop pretending.
Given that one Communist Vietnam led to a whole lot of bad outcomes, I think opposing it wasn’t the worst possible idea.
But I do wonder why I need to admit to my culpability in the death of millions in Indo-China for one set of policy options, but that you don’t have to admit to culpability for Pol Pot (a consequence of one communist Vietnam) and all the other horrors that happened after the US left.
Actually, given that I had just turned seven a couple of weeks or so before the fall of Saigon, and that you weren’t even alive then, I don’t see why either of us need to own any of it.
When there’s actual Communist subversion going on, it’s pretty clear that being worried about Communist subversion is NOT paranoia.
Spying is what the Rosenbergs and Hiss did. The terror that Stalin’s people performed in Spain against the non-aligned Republicans was actual subversion. Communist Subversion! was what you had when you had no idea what there was to subvert.
I liked this one best:
Nena – 99 Red Ballons\
I’m still amused that she was getting her American sci-fi shows/movies confused.
I was alive and of adult age during the Vietnam War era but I don’t feel any particular culpability about the war there. I was not a supporter of the Vietnam War. I didn’t demonstrate against it but I didn’t support it, either. I didn’t think it was particularly in the U. S. interest. However, I did make people angry by taking the position that there was no coherent reason to oppose SEATO while supporting NATO other than racism.
I was called up but didn’t serve. I have very poor vision and my knees were wrecked from a decade of martial arts and a congenital deformity of the knee. The draft board decided they didn’t need me that much.
Always loved her accenting for
“Super hi-tech jet fighters….”
And for no reason at all, I think I’ll throw in this.
Marilyn Whitelaw – I Dream of Jeannie’s Diner
MM: I wasn’t offended by the Grapes of Wrath. I was the one who convinced my daughter to watch it to better understand the Great Depression. The movie reminds me of my grandfather, who became somewhat of a migrant worker during the period, and who held the Democratic Party, the party of the working man, in the highest esteem and loyalty for all his days. Well acted and some beautiful shots.
But the movie is an oversimplification of complex events, including the federal government’s role in forcing tenants off the land by paying farm owners not to farm. The federal government relief camp is too perfect, leaving the impression that something sinister is afoot. And the events play out to set the stage for political speeches as to the system being broken and the people need to rise up and take back the land owned by the few. If I changed the story to make the landowners obviously Jewish, I think you might easier recognize the propaganda angle.
I didn’t think it was particularly in the U. S. interest.
That was the position one of my cousins took. He was an Air Force fighter jock who spent several years in the Hanoi Hilton. When the POWs were released he caused something of a stink. He got back to the world and made two points: One, “What took you so long?”; and two, “We don’t have any business in that war.” My dad was in Europe at the time, and it apparently got big play over there, and some over here.
Nevertheless, he became the first of the pilots to return to active flight duty. (If you know where to look, he was also famous for something else for his time spent in the Hanoi Hilton. I’ll just say that West Virginians are a particularly mean and stubborn lot, and that those CAN be virtues.)
@Modulo Myself
Two million or twenty million, it matters not. You should blame the Soviet Union or Communist China, or you could blame the people themselves. When it came time to pick a side, they picked incorrectly.
This is an invaluable life lesson for the survivors.
I recall reading Orson Wells on the HUAC hearings, something to the effect that the Hollywood people who testified and named names weren’t trying to save their lives — they were trying to save their swimming pools.
… weren’t trying to save their lives — they were trying to save their swimming pools.
Priorities!
Actually, given that I had just turned seven a couple of weeks or so before the fall of Saigon, and that you weren’t even alive then, I don’t see why either of us need to own any of it.
My father was an officer in the navy. Amongst other things, he ran a Swiftboat. He died before I got out of high school and I don’t have a really good grip on all that he did, aside from names and places where he was, and the awards and so on. I would really say that from him all I learned about Vietnam were a few funny stories plus the conviction that the war was a terrible waste. That’s it. He just wanted nothing more to do with it. Why? Because it caused him deep unhappiness to think about. My feeling is that you owe it to your parents to learn about their silences and meditate upon them.
MM,
” It’s time to admit that minus American involvement in Indochina there would not be have anywhere near the numbers of people who died there. ”
How many would have died minus Chinese and Soviet involvement? Or the French involvement? Or the Viet Cong involvement in the South? Or, for that matter, those who arranged the partition of Vietnam in the first place?
“By the 50s it was clear that outright war with the USSR could not happen. ”
So the Cuban Missile Crisis was much ado about nothing?
I find it hard to take your sweeping generalizations seriously given the amount of contradictory historical evidence – not to mention the benefit of hindsight.
This is one of my favorite of Orson Welles’ stories.
So the Cuban Missile Crisis was much ado about nothing?
It was sort-of about nothing, wasn’t it? In the end we removed missiles from Turkey and the Soviets did not get theirs in Cuba. But even had there been missiles in Cuba, what would the difference have been except there being in some faction of some part of the Soviet military the crazy belief that a first-strike might work. As far as I can tell, except for Cuba, the closest we came to a nuclear war was when a Soviet computer erroneously said that we were attacking. This was in the 80s, I think.
By could I meant no sane person would want it to happen because of the consequences. That’s unique. The consequences were unique and the restriction because of them was unique.
“It was sort-of about nothing, wasn’t it?”
“But even had there been missiles in Cuba, what would the difference have been except there being in some faction of some part of the Soviet military the crazy belief that a first-strike might work.”
You really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. The US would have invaded if the Soviet’s hadn’t pulled the missiles out.
You really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. The US would have invaded if the Soviet’s hadn’t pulled the missiles out.
I know that. But cancel the blockade and take away the public revelations and what would have happened? Would the Soviets have used those missiles? They were just pieces on a chessboard. Half of the moves made were moves made to satisfy other elements in the side making the move.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, no side ever pulled anything like that again.
“But cancel the blockade and take away the public revelations and what would have happened”
If you want to debate alternate histories, that’s fine, but don’t claim that a war with the USSR “could not happen” and then engage in fantasy what-if’s. How about instead of “cancel the blockade” we say “cancel the deployment of nukes to Cuba?”
“Would the Soviets have used those missiles?”
Rhetorical question? You’ve already declared it could not happen.
“They were just pieces on a chessboard. Half of the moves made were moves made to satisfy other elements in the side making the move.”
What you believe you perceive with perfect clarity thanks to fifty years of hindsight is not anything like what decisionmakers perceived at the time.
Decision making in the midst of a crisis is an entirely different process than musing about the myriad of options years later.
Do not forget about the comfy sofa in the safe living room.
President Truman is a monster because he made a decision based upon circumstances we can imagine, at best.
The Communists at the time were no different than today’s jihadists. How many infiltrators are an acceptable number – one, two, one-hundred, one-thousand, ten-thousand, one-hundred-thousand, more, many more?
“As far as I can tell, except for Cuba, the closest we came to a nuclear war was when a Soviet computer erroneously said that we were attacking. This was in the 80s, I think. ”
And that was very, very close indeed. The journey to the brink was owing to a NATO exercise called Able Archer 83. President Reagan, to his lasting credit, when told of the Russian fears and reaction, put himself on the road to the nuclear disarmement talks. He was quite shaken by what had happened:
I think it might have been Yuri Bronfenbrenner (a family friend) who first pointed out the role of projection in foreign policy thinking.
Unless you know Russian history, you will never understand the Russian mindset. The Soviet Union was not a traditional Russian institution, but a way of thinking ingrained for four hundred years does not go away overnight.
Russia has no natural protection on her western and southern flanks, and when she has not been strong enough to repel invaders, she has been invaded. Prior to the first Czars, there were five seasons – summer, fall, winter, spring, and Mongrel raiding party.
Russia straddles Europe and Asia, but Russians are welcomed by neither Europeans nor Asians. They are outcasts. Their royalty has been treated as second class for marriage candidates.
Historically, Russia’s best defensive strategy was to attack her enemies before they could attack her. Otherwise, the Russian defensive tactic was to retreat inland and burn anything useful to the enemy (food, shelter, etc. – everything).
The Siege of Leningrad was an uncharacteristic tactic, but the acceptance of deprivation was not uncharacteristic of the Russian people. Anybody who thinks that a few sanctions are going to move a people who would live over two and a half years on rats, dogs, cats, and dead bodies is living in fantasy land.
With the acquisition of nuclear weapons and ICBM’s, the Russians no longer need to retreat into the interior and burn everything they own to deny it to the enemy. They can now reach out and touch the enemy and burn down everything he owns.
I would suggest that Putin is not some spoiled brat American posing as a leader, and he is not a thug who craves world acceptance. He is a hard ass who during the 1990’s had a four hundred year mindset confirmed, and the Russian people are seeing that mindset confirmed even today.
They will not start lobbing nukes over Ukraine, but if a NATO tank were to enter Russia proper, that would be different.
(I doubt many of the Sovietologists actually studied Russian history well enough to understand the Russian mindset or the reason for it.)
MM: I enjoyed that link to the Welles / Cavett interview.
That wasn’t always the case. In the 14th century the Prince of Kiev married the King of France’s daughter. The Mongol invasion put that growing influence into hiatus.
Catherine the Great was a bona fide Prussian princess. Marrying Peter III was a great opportunity for her. It certainly wasn’t a love match. He was, er, simple.
Yeah, that’s about right. The positions he’s staking out are very popular in Russia, a consensus. The 80%+ approval rating he enjoys is not imaginary or compelled somehow.
I look forward to hearing what my daughter learns about the Cold War, or any period in which I lived for that matter. I believe MM didn’t live through any part of the Cold War, and he is sifting through objective facts through the rear view mirror that don’t necessarily reflect the reality of the experience of the past.
I was in school in the 70s and 80s, and remember duck and cover in grade school and a broad consensus that war with the Soviets or at least a nuclear exchange was inevitable. The was a premises of the anti-nuclear weapons movement, as well as the Carter/Reagan defense build-up. It was in the popular music and in movies like Red Dawn and Rambo III. The logic of M.A.D. and maintaining credible deterrence made persistent demands but perhaps too subtle for history books.
But by my time Communism had lost any credible threat as an ideological force. The few Communists in America denied recognizing a Communist government in existence, though they tended to be extremely naive about “Marxist” revolutions in third-world countries. U.S. labor unions were stridently anti-Communist. The Soviet threat was in it being a carefully honed military machine that was expansionary and ideologically paranoid. Then it was gone like it was never there in the first place.
More dance music videos from the early 80s:
Fishbone, Party at Ground Zero
Heaven 17 – Let’s All Make A Bomb
An old friend’s favorite:
Alphaville – Forever Young
PD: I grew up in the 80s and I don’t remember ever having a duck and cover drill. I also don’t remember there being a consensus that a nuclear war would happen. I don’t remember nuclear war even existing as a possibility.
It might have a lot do with religion. I’ve known some people who grew up in evangelical churches and they seemed much more in tune with apocalyptic thinking. I was raised as an Episcopalian, and there is, obviously, little in the way of eschatology in our tradition.
As far as popular culture goes, it doesn’t seem like many people who wrote or made things took the threat seriously. There’s Red Dawn, sure, but there’s also Spies Like Us. I saw Red Dawn in the theater, and loved it, but did anyone take it as a prediction of things to come? To me, the only big historical event that I actually remember people responding to emotionally was the Challenger explosion. There was something very detached about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and then the Soviet Union. America, to me, was a very insulated country and the history that it proved sounded forced. I did not know how insulated it was, or I did not have this idea. At the time, I was like: adults really want to believe that this is important to them. Anyway MTV exposed me to rap and an older brother of a friend Husker Du, and it’s pretty hard to take Their history seriously after you’ve heard Bob Mould and Public Enemy. Years later, when I started to read real literature and came to DeLillo’s Libra and then Underworld, I felt like his histories were those I lived at the end of, and not the official ones taught to us. There’s a bad review of Libra by George Will, written back at a time when columnists engaged real books. He calls DeLillo a great writer but a bad citizen. It sounds like a compliment to me.
Gag me with a spoon, there is a website that collects Songs About Nuclear War from the Eighties A lot of these are pretty obscure or questionable. Depeche Mode’s “Leave in Silence” is actually about the Falklands War, though it does have the line “Nothing’s going to save us from the big drop,” which I think despairs that if diplomacy cannot resolve an issue about an island full of sheep, what hope is there for important challenges?
PD:
The site does contain this.
The period I am probably most focused on is after the 1979 Invasion of Afghanistan, which ended detente, led to Carter drawing a line in the sand that committed U.S. to war with the Soviets if they approached the Persian Gulf region, public knowledge that the Soviet Union had deployed troops and offensive capabilities in Cuba, the failure of the Senate to ratify SALT II, and the beginning of a huge military build-up that increased under Reagan.
What I meant by inevitable is that the bi-partisan policy of containment was premised on the view that the Soviet Union was a hostile expansionary power that needed to be actively controlled and limited. The invasion of Afghanistan and the Cuban disclosure (by progressive Democrat Sen. Frank Church) was accepted as a failure of the implementation of this policy.
Critics of containment argued that the policy placed the two superpowers on a regular course of confrontation, brinkmanship and hostility that will eventually, intentionally or not, lead to total nuclear war. In other words, war with the Soviets was either inevitable unless a containment policy was executed properly or it was inevitable because containment carries the seeds of conflict.
As for the regular folks, mention also must go to the TV movie, The Day After — a movie depicting life after a nuclear exchange, and the highest rated television show in history.
PD,
Ah, the memories. I actually saw Fishbone in concert in college – I’d forgotten about that. I’ve seen Public Enemy too – they are still an old school favorite.
The Day After – yeah, I don’t remember any Cosby episodes, but I remember that. I also remember By Dawn’s Early Light which is probably the bookend to movies about war with the Soviets.
I forgot Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes, with the video depicting Reagan and Chernenko in a wrestling match that was deemed too violent for MTV. And then the accompanying t-shirts that became a fashion craze that said “Frankie Say WAR! Hide Yourself.”
I’ve heard accounts from former military personnel hinting that we came closer to war with the Soviet Union a few times in the ’50s than we did with them over Cuba. Not downplaying Cuba, just passing it along. The only one I can pin down would be the ’56 Hungarian uprising. Perhaps the accounts I saw also included the Berlin Blockade from ’48.
Anyway, my family was living fairly close to a SAC base in Florida for the Cuban Crisis. I can tell you that people down here were quite shaken by the incident, including people in the know.
I’ve also had some family connections to some Cold Warriors on both the military & intelligence side. All of them took the prospects of potential war seriously indeed.