INTRODUCTION

1 May 1950 was a bad day for the children of Mosinee, Wisconsin. Awakening to the discovery that their town had been taken over by communists acting in league with the Soviet Union, high school students rose from their beds to learn that they were required to report to school. Once there, the teens were coerced into forming a Young Communists League and forced to listen to a lecture by former general secretary of the US Communist Party Ben Gitlow, who warned them that family bonds were secondary to the needs of the Party. The students then watched in horror as the high schools football coach was arrested by communist police and dragged off the athletic field. The school band then struck up a sprightly tune and set off on a march to Red Square (the newly rechristened town square). Five hundred people, both adults and children, followed the band while brandishing signs proclaiming allegiance to Stalin and denouncing religion. Those who did not act as they were expected to were sharply rebuked. Little boy, bow to the red flag!, Chief Commissar Joseph Kornfeder, a Czech immigrant and graduate of Lenin University, barked at a puzzled child. Perhaps the cruellest blow to the children of Mosinee, however, was their discovery that candy would henceforth be available only to Communist Youth members, and they would have to learn to subsist on the same bland diet of potato soup and black bread as the adults.1 Children were undoubtedly bewildered and frightened during the twoday period in which the American Legion, guided by former members of the Communist Party like Gitlow and Kornfeder and acting with the assistance of Mosinees mayor, police chief and most respected citizens, staged a communist takeover of the small Wisconsin town. The mock invasion had been planned to remind Americans of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and to provide them with a supposed taste of what real life was like for people who lived behind the Iron Curtain. The perverse pageantry that took place on those two spring days in Mosinee, Wisconsin, was only one of many attempts by Americas civic leaders to warn their fellow citizens of the dangers of communism. Such instruction, like most during the Cold War, was aimed not only at adults but at children as well.

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During the Cold War era, American childhood was highly politicized. In the period following World War II, American adults quickly realized that the conflict with the Soviet Union, while it did include wars fought primarily by proxy armies at a safe distance from the national borders of either nation, would not be a shooting war. This war, unlike others the two nations had fought, would be one based largely on ideology and on the ability of that ideology to secure allies (and access to natural resources and markets) in third world nations. Victory would come when one of the great superpowers either annihilated the other through the deployment of nuclear weapons or (considered the more likely alternative by the late 1960s) had outdone the other in spreading its political beliefs, its economic system and its culture to a larger portion of the worlds people than the other. Success in the Cold War would therefore be dependent upon the production of patriotic, ideologically sound citizens at home. Like other nations born of revolution or deliberately created to conform to the dictates of an ideology, the United States had always taken seriously the task of teaching children what it meant to be American and why their nation was superior to all others. However, this mission took on added importance in the decades immediately following World War II. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union swiftly grew in the post-war period, Americans found themselves poised for potential battle with a nation whose fundamental beliefs and values clashed with their own. The Cold War face-off between the US and the USSR was different in many crucial ways, however, from previous conflicts in which the US had been involved. Before World War II and the Cold War, Americans had never found themselves enmeshed in a conflict that was so thoroughly ideological in nature, one based almost entirely upon a clash between profoundly different values and beliefs. The American Revolution, while strongly rooted in republican ideology on the colonial side, was not essentially a conflict with fundamental British political thought. Indeed, many of the writers from whom the nations founders drew inspiration and upon whose ideas they had based their own political thinking were British. The American concern for protecting liberty and curbing the actions of tyrants came from their reading of John Locke. Other British citizens, including many living in England, held the same values. Liberty was an important British value as well as an American one. The resulting conflict was thus not the result of a profound difference of opinion over what rights citizens possessed or what principles a legitimate government should be based upon. It was, instead, a disagreement over which British citizens were the true upholders of these values, those in England or those in North America. It was a rebellion against a government that Englishmen in several of the mother countrys colonies believed was not adhering to agreed-upon political principles, nor respecting peoples fundamental rights.

Introduction

Similarly, the American Civil War, while it was occasioned by a profound difference of opinion regarding the injustice of slavery and the limits of federal power, was not the result of a conflict over whether or not the nation should continue to uphold the values of freedom and equality or be governed by the US Constitution. The debate which led to the war was over which section of the country, the slave-free northern states or the slave-owning southern states, was the true heir to Americas founders and the true upholder of the intent expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy considered liberty and equality to be unimportant. The argument was whether the values of liberty and equality were inconsistent with the right to own slaves. Most northerners said they were; most southerners argued that forbidding either the existence or the expansion of slavery would interfere with the liberty of slave owners to hold property and, by denying them the right to take their human property to any region governed by US law, subjected them to unequal treatment by depriving them of the rights enjoyed by other Americans able to transport their non-human property wherever they wished. Nor was it a battle, so far as most of the participants were concerned, to elevate African Americans to a position where they could enjoy true freedom and equality. Few whites believed that Americans of African ancestry were completely equal to those of European ancestry. Only the most radical of abolitionists believed that blacks should not only be granted equal political rights and protection before the law but also allowed into white social circles and invited to attend school, live among and intermarry with whites. None of Americas other wars had been even remotely ideological in origin, although propagandists might have thrown that cloak about them. Minor skirmishes with Canada, a brief war with Mexico, battles with Native American tribes, and the war against the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines (and the subsequent battles with native Filipinos) were fought largely to secure land or to gain influence in foreign regions. Even World War I, despite President Woodrow Wilsons claims that America was entering the war (nearly three years after it began) to make the world safe for democracy, was not truly a battle of ideologies. While the extension of democracy and the prevention of future wars may have been the true intent of the idealistic Wilson, this was probably not the sentiment of most Americans. Certainly the other major powers involved in the war were not fighting to defend any particular ideology in a conflict occasioned largely by attempts to seize or maintain control over vast empires both within and outside of Europe. World War II and the Cold War then were the first conflicts between the US, a country founded upon the belief that it stood as the sole protector of human rights to liberty and equality and convinced that only its democratic political institutions could save the world from oppression, and other nations that had

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also been created to serve a political ideology either fascism or communism. Furthermore, the Cold War was also the first war in which the United States fought against a country that had similarly been the product of a revolutionary struggle intended to overthrow tyranny. There was, of course, the desire during the Cold War, on the part of both the US and the USSR, to secure foreign markets and access to natural resources and energy supplies, enlist allies and further cultural expansion. However, such goals remained secondary to and always in the service of the desire to both protect and promote a particular political ideology. The Cold War was also the first conflict of the new nuclear age, and both sides were fully aware of the fact that, after 1949, when the Soviets first successfully exploded their own atomic bomb, either country could completely destroy its enemy if it so chose. The reality of an ideological enemy armed with the most powerful weapon ever developed drove the United States government to demand as it never had before the whole-hearted support of unquestionably patriotic citizens committed to defending democratic political institutions and the American way of life. Such total dedication required that Americans believe completely in the superiority of the nations economic and political systems, the benefits of US citizenship, the special destiny of the United States to mould the world in its image and the need to protect the nation from all potential enemies. This could only be achieved, Americans realized, as they had at other times of conflict, by inculcating such values and beliefs in children from nearly the moment of birth. This was not the first time that Americans had politicized childhood. The same concerns over the inculcation of proper values and beliefs had occurred at various times when Americans felt that the ideals and principles which, in their eyes, made the country and its political system unique were under attack by foreign powers. Indeed, the very first attempts to politicize American childhood occurred at the countrys inception. As the British colonists in the region that would later become the United States gathered their forces in the early 1770s, children were recruited to assist in the approaching war. Many children, having imbibed the republican ideology of the adults around them, went willingly to the fight. And in the years leading up to the American Revolution children, especially girls, willingly took part in the boycotts of British goods that took place in many of the colonies. Children in Boston, the centre of revolutionary fervour, willingly gave up tea and clothing made from imported British fabric. One eleven-year-old Bostonian, Anna Green Winslow, proudly called herself a daughter of liberty and strove to wear garments made only of homespun cloth.2 Bostons boys did their part by harassing British soldiers on the street.3 And when the conflict did erupt into full-blown war, many of these boys and others signed up to fight in the Continental Army.4 Adults had prepared children for these roles, perhaps unconsciously, by teaching them the values of independence and equality from their earliest years.

Introduction

In the decades preceding the Revolution, parents in the British colonies in North America had shifted child-rearing practices in order to stress the equality of children and their elders (in theory if not always in practice), the importance of independent thought and choice, and the necessity of taking action against injustice. Parents did this by, for example, eliminating those token tributes to adult superiority such as requiring children to bow to their parents or to stand at the table as their mother and father ate. At colonial colleges, students, who were often in their adolescent years, were allowed to abandon such practices as bowing or removing their hats when in the presence of tutors and instructors.5 The politicization of children and childhood continued after the Revolution. In fact, one could argue that the inculcation of republican virtues and values took on even greater importance once the conflict had ended. No longer faced with the reality of actual war, Americans risked losing sight of those beliefs that had led them to declare war and take up arms in the first place. In order to maintain the ideological purity and patriotic fervour that a small, struggling republic needed to survive, American citizens needed to have such virtues as love of country, commitment to republicanism and dedication to the values of liberty, equality and justice inculcated in them during their earliest years. In keeping with the beliefs of writer Samuel Harrison Smith that the virtue or vice of an individual, the happiness or the misery of a family, the glory or the infamy of a nation, have their sources in the cradle, parents and educators strove to create young patriots almost from the moment of birth.6 This new necessity prompted the development of the American system of public education and gave added importance to the roles of women who, as republican mothers, would become the first teachers of the newest citizens of the United States. Because, in the belief of Americas founders, a republic could prosper only with the support of virtuous citizens, Americans had to be taught to become virtuous. The stress on virtue led parents and educators to concentrate on both instructing children in the components of a basic education (reading, writing and arithmetic) and, more importantly, developing character in the nations future voters and the girls who would become the wives and mothers of future voters. To this end, children learned to read and spell from books featuring Noah Websters Americanized versions of English words, which had been deliberately simplified and rationalized so that more ordinary Americans could learn to read unlike their British counterparts whose haughty masters forced them to insert the letter u into words like labor. Similarly, children were taught both recent history and virtuous conduct by being told tales about the greatness of the nations founders and reading Peter Parleys hagiography of brave, honest George Washington. The politicization of childhood intensified once again during the American Civil War as both the North and South strove to enlist the support of children

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and to teach them their respective interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Books in northern schools, such as the Union ABC, taught children to spell with the lesson that A is for America, land of the free. Southern teachers taught children arithmetic by asking them to calculate how many Confederate soldiers would be needed to kill forty-nine Union soldiers if it usually took only one Johnny Reb to beat seven Yanks.7 So well did this indoctrination succeed that southern children rejoiced upon hearing the news that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. It may be abstractly wrong to be so jubilant, one South Carolina girl admitted, but I just cant help it.8 The resolve of Americas children would be tested again in World War II, and the politicization of childhood would once more become a subject of great interest for American adults. During World War II, children of various ages played an active role in the US war effort. Adolescents contributed most directly by taking jobs that had once been occupied by men and women who had joined the armed forces or had gone to work in defence factories. Other teenagers assisted working mothers by babysitting their children or by caring for their own younger siblings. Some volunteered to work at government-funded child care centres.9 As adult women worked long shifts, children often assumed such roles as shopping, cooking and cleaning. When schools across the country faced severe teacher shortages because the teachers had resigned either to serve in the armed forces or to work at more highly paid jobs in the defence industries, high school students often took responsibility for teaching younger children.10 During the war, other American children internalized the same message as did Nell Thomas, who turned eight on the day the Japanese attacked the US Navy base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii: We were all able to contribute in some way. We were constantly reminded that ours was the best country in the world, and it was our duty to fight to preserve democracy.11 Children who were too young to work or to help their mothers by caring for the house contributed to the war effort in a variety of other ways. As part of the Schools at War Program, created by the Office of Education and the Treasury Department in 1942, children collected scrap materials (for example, metal, paper, cooking fats, etc.) for use in the war effort, repaired old clothing and toys so that new ones would not have to be purchased, and created posters to make adults aware of neighbourhood drives for scrap metal and other materials needed by the defence industries.12 Children also collected used books to send to the troops and pledged not to make noise at times and in places where they knew that people who worked late night and early morning shifts in defence plants were sleeping.13 The efforts of American children during World War II at times verge on the extraordinary; in the first half of 1943, American children collected 26,000,000 pounds of scrap metal for the war industries.14 Children spent their money to buy war bonds and War Savings stamps, often going without lunch in order to afford them. Children also

Introduction

proved quite successful at selling war bonds; by June 1944, American children had raised some $510 million through their purchases and sales of war bonds.15 If World War II reminded adults of the contributions that American children could make to their country, it also alerted them to the dangers of the politicization of childhood in enemy nations. In Nazi Germany, the Hitler Youth played a much larger role in the war than did American youngsters. As early as 1938, Adolf Hitler had decided that young Germans would play an important role in any conflict that was to come; he announced that
after these youths have entered our organizations at age ten we shall under no circumstances return them into the hands of our old champions of class and social standing, but instead place them immediately in the Party or the Labour Front, the SA or the SS And thus they will never be free again, for the rest of their lives.16

Like young Americans, members of the Hitler Youth collected scrap metal and other materials for the defence industries. They also worked on German farms, served coffee to the troops in railway stations, took on jobs formerly held by adults (such as delivering the mail) and taught the German language to ethnic Germans from other nations, such as Poland and the USSR, who had largely forgotten their Germanic heritage.17 As the war progressed, however, and German victory seemed increasingly unlikely, the members of the Hitler Youth soon found themselves fully enmeshed in the dangers that war might bring. As the war on the Eastern Front turned against Germany during the Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi leaders formed plans to make the Hitler Youth crucial auxiliaries to the nations rapidly diminishing armed forces. In January 1943, boys aged between fifteen and seventeen were drafted to maintain artillery sites in cities under German control. The boys were provided with four weeks training and were then set to work spotting enemy aircraft and loading and firing the anti-aircraft guns, often while coming under fire themselves. On the occasions, far from rare, when the guns malfunctioned and exploded, the young flak helpers had to search for their missing companions in the rubble and load their remains into body bags.18 As bombs rained down on German cities, Hitler Youth also served as air raid wardens and fire fighters. Many dashed into burning buildings to rescue the occupants and, when they failed, later dug the charred remains from the debris.19 As the end of the war grew closer, so did the participation of the young. By 1944, when German defeat seemed certain, female members of the Hitler Youth, who had technically been forbidden to take part in combat, were assigned to artillery sites as flak helpers as well.20 As Russian troops approached Berlin from the east and the British and Americans bore down from the west, boys and girls built blockades in the streets of the city. Girls in their early teens were taught how to use hand grenades and machine guns and sent to sacrifice their lives to defend German cities.21 Following the German surrender, American servicemen,

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many of whom were given the role of teaching democracy to former members of the Hitler Youth, learned the full extent to which ideologically committed young people could serve their country.22 The Nazis, however, were not the only combatants in World War II to attempt to raise children so committed to an ideology and so devoted to the nation of their birth that they were willing to sacrifice everything for it. The Soviet Union had done the same. For more than a decade preceding the beginning of the Cold War, dating largely from the time of Joseph Stalins ascension to power, Soviet parents, teachers, youth group leaders and politicians had taught children about the benefits of communism and encouraged an undying love for the Soviet Union. Indeed, raising ideologically sound children devoted to the ideals of communism who were willing to defend the motherland at all costs was one of the ways by which an adult could prove his or her own commitment to the nation. A 1937 Soviet publication reminded parents that if a person brings up his children properly, he is a good Communist.23 According to an open letter written in 1940 by parents employed in the Soviet textile industry, raising children to be good communists included, among other things, developing in them a sense of sincerity and truthfulness, self-abnegation and heroism, love of work and fidelity to their socialist motherland, to the Communist Party and to our great wise leader Comrade Stalin.24 Soviet children learned these lessons in a variety of ways. In primary schools, children read books with such titles as We Will Catch Up and Overtake the American Chicken! while sitting in the shadow of posters showing Soviet leaders, primarily Joseph Stalin until his fall from political grace in the early 1960s, smiling as they held small children, usually cheerful, pig-tailed, pretty little girls.25 (One of the most famous pieces of Soviet propaganda ever produced was the picture of a happy Stalin bearing a beaming Gelya Markizova, a member of one of the Soviet Unions many ethnic minority groups, in his arms.) In secondary schools, older children received military training. In school, children learned lessons in communism and patriotism not only from schoolbooks and teachers but from the communist childrens group the Pioneers as well.26 Outside of school, children learned about the greatness of Soviet leaders in books and poems written for children. Some works of literature made leaders such as Stalin seem almost magical and emphasized their supposed love for children to an extraordinary degree. For example, in a Yiddish poem of the 1930s, a boy tells his mother that when he was menaced by a pack of wolves in the forest, Stalin spied, heard that I was in deadly danger, / So he sent a tank out for me.27 Tales for children written during and after World War II encouraged them to be on the alert for spies and revelled in the exploits of heroic, martyred children who had died to save their country. The story Partisan Tanya, for example, regaled children with the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been

Introduction

executed by the Nazis, and The Ballad of the Unknown Boy celebrated a Russian lad (fate unknown) who assassinated an SS officer. Was he blown up? the author queries. I do not know. The bloody trace is still.28 Given the fervour with which the Soviet Union approached the politicization of childhood, and having learned from the Nazis what patriotic, ideologically committed children and youth were capable of, it is not surprising that Americans concluded in the years following World War II that victory in the Cold War would ultimately belong to the nation with not only the superior economic system and the best equipped armed forces but also with the most citizens devoted to the principles for which it stood. For this reason, the politicization of American childhood, which many Americans must have perceived as an effort to catch up with the Soviets and beat them at their own game, not only continued but in many ways intensified once the guns of World War II had been silenced. The goals of Cold War American parents were to produce independent, selfdisciplined, civic-minded, patriotic children who were willing to work hard to serve the interests of their families, their communities and the nation. These children should understand democracy and its ideals of liberty and justice and should have internalized a desire to acquire private property. Such children, while obedient to adults, should not be subservient and should, despite the commands or pressures of others, always act in the manner that they knew was right. Finally, in order to produce strong, courageous men who were willing to fight and die for their country and future citizens to take their place when they fell, boys and girls had to learn their appropriate gender roles, adhere to them rigidly and develop the ability to restrain their sexual urges until they one day fulfilled their desire to form a home with a suitable partner of the opposite sex. American children, however, should not have such values taught to them in a way that resembled the indoctrination of Nazi or Soviet youngsters. Instead, they should be gently taught in such a way that these values and goals were made to seem a natural part of a childs personality and conception of him/herself. In this way, American children would grow into adults who freely chose to conform to the needs of society and the nation. As Leerom Medovoi argues in his discussion of teenage rebels, anything that resembled direct propagandizing of children or coerced obedience betrayed the fundamental American value of free choice and appeared to American adults as too akin to Soviet methods of forcing children to adhere to the dictates of the state. The goal of Cold War American child rearing then was willing conformity to national and societal ideals, and not forced conformity to the dictates of a tyrannical state.29 This campaign to raise children both willing and able to defend the United States against the forces of communism was undertaken on many fronts. Parents, teachers, neighbours, doctors, clergymen, social workers, academics, politicians, law enforcement officials, manufacturers, journalists, television producers and

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others all took part in the endeavour. Lessons in the superiority of democracy and the American political system; the greatness of American history and the American way of life; the advantages of capitalism; the virtues of honesty and loyalty; the need to serve the larger community and conform to its values; and the importance of developing and adhering to appropriate gender roles were taught by a wide variety of people in a wide range of environments. The family home, schools, houses of worship, neighbourhood playgrounds, athletic fields and gymnasiums, libraries and movie theatres all served as venues for instruction. Lessons in being a good American began in early childhood with the adoption of specific child-rearing techniques and were reinforced by the ways in which children interacted with others in their age group. Instruction, both formal and informal, continued as children grew to school age and finally ended in late adolescence when young men prepared for military service and a job and young women prepared for marriage and motherhood. The urgency with which American parents, teachers and others approached the task of rearing patriotic Americans may seem strange, perhaps even bizarre or humorous, to the people of todays world. However, faced with the realities of the time, a time marked by frequently hysterical political rhetoric and an arms race on both sides and not being gifted with several decades of hindsight, the actions of American adults in the period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s do not seem all that strange. Nor, given the conflicts over cultural values and national ideals in the post-September 11 world, should they seem all that foreign. This book will cover the period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the 1970s, when a period of dtente began between the US and the Soviet Union. I have chosen to end my discussion in the early 1970s for several reasons. First, it is difficult to determine when the period referred to as the Cold War actually ended. Did it end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? Did it end during the era of glasnost in the late 1980s? Was it occasioned by the collapse of the Berlin Wall or by calls for democracy in Eastern Europe? Did it end with the presidency of Ronald Reagan? I have thus chosen to confine my research and discussion to the period during which there is no doubt that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union existed. I have also chosen to end with the 1970s because tensions between the superpowers did noticeably weaken at this time. Although Cold War rhetoric began anew with the election of Ronald Reagan to the American presidency, few Americans actually feared conflict with the Soviet Union at this point, and many regarded Reagans denunciation of the evil empire as an object of humour, an international embarrassment or both. I have also chosen to limit my study to children between infancy and eighteen years of age. While one might argue that those in their early twenties are to some extent still adolescents in terms of physical, mental and emotional development, I have confined my discussion to those who fit the social definition of

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children. In the period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, most young people over the age of eighteen had graduated from high school. Most had gotten jobs, married or enrolled in colleges or universities; some had done all of these. Many young men had joined or been inducted into the military. In Western society, with few and fairly recent exceptions, youth who live apart from their parents, are gainfully employed or have married are no longer dependent upon adults to provide for them or make decisions for them. Thus, they are no longer children. Because this book does not cover the experience of college and university students, I have not included a discussion of certain topics that some may feel should have been included. I have not, for example, discussed the use of drugs other than alcohol among teenagers. Although such a discussion might have been included in my chapter on juvenile delinquency, I chose not to do so for several reasons. First, the topic of drug use by adolescents during the period covered in this book could not be adequately covered in one chapter, and a second book would be needed to cover such a vast and complex subject. Second, there is no connection (or at least I cannot perceive one) between fears of communism and drug use. While some may have believed that those who sold drugs to teens were part of a communist conspiracy (just as some people today maintain that crack addicts in America are the victims of a CIA plot to destroy the African-American community), I am not aware of any evidence indicating that such a belief existed among a sizeable portion of the American population. I also have left out a discussion of student protest and opposition to the war in Vietnam. While such actions did take place on high school campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s, this behaviour is associated more with college and university students and protest marches, discussion of students rights and boycotts of classes were much more common at institutions of higher learning. Furthermore, my interest lies in the manner in which adults attempted to create a shared feeling of patriotism, a fear and hatred of communism and the Soviet Union and a desire to adhere to narrow standards regarding appropriate behaviour among American children in the late 1940s to 1960s. Throughout this volume I intend to show how consensus was built rather than how it was destroyed. Hence, the dissolution of this consensus and rebellion against adult values will be briefly discussed in the conclusion, but otherwise it is not addressed. Just as this book does not purport to be a study of all the activities in which young people in the United States were engaged during the time frame of the Cold War, it also does not pretend to be a study of the experience of all American children. The childhood described in this book is primarily that of middle-class, American-born children of European ancestry. The experience of children of other socioeconomic or racial groups will be discussed to the extent possible. However, most of the official discourse of the Cold War period centred on white, middle-class children. Child-rearing guides and magazines for

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adults were written primarily for a middle-class audience. They may have been purchased and read by working-class parents or people of colour, but the advice provided was intended to (re)produce members of the middle class. Similarly, magazines, dating guides and etiquette manuals for teenagers encouraged adolescents to embrace middle-class behaviour. Public institutions also engaged in the task of teaching and enforcing middleclass standards and values. This was the job of social workers and juvenile court judges and was certainly the goal of American schools. Although an effort was made during the Cold War period to make schools more inclusive and to teach children to respect people of all backgrounds, the reality was that even as white, middle-class children learned (in some schools) to respect African Americans, Asians and American Indians, teachers instructed children of all classes, races and creeds in white, middle-class values and ideals. Poor children, working-class children and children of non-Protestant and/or non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds did occasionally appear in textbooks or in the educational films shown in American classrooms, but the reason for their presence was usually either to evoke compassion in the student viewers or to invite them to solve the characters problems. Quite often, especially in films about social class or juvenile delinquency, the problems could be solved through adopting the values and emulating the behaviour of the middle class. The purveyors of popular culture also displayed a middle-class bias. While the manufacturers of toys, games and comic books undoubtedly wished wholeheartedly that they could sell their wares to every child in America, the reality was that the majority of their customers were middle class, and their products were priced and advertised to appeal to this part of the population. Similarly, television shows usually featured middle-class characters, and when poor people or people of colour made a rare appearance on the screen, they were usually depicted as outsiders. Although this focus on white members of the middle class may seem too narrow, this is not necessarily the case. During the Cold War period, most Americans (as they do today) either were members of the middle class, considered themselves to be middle class (even if their income and life style were not) or aspired to become (or to have their children become) members of the middle class. In the years following World War II, the desire of working-class Americans to achieve middle-class status was not merely a foolish dream. Economic prosperity, the expansion of public education and the growth of mass-produced housing in suburban developments made it possible for many workers in blue collar occupations to achieve a level of income (and the luxuries that such incomes made possible) equivalent to that of many white collar managers, small business owners, teachers and office workers. The GI Bill also offered low interest loans to veterans of the armed forces that enabled former servicemen

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to buy houses or start small businesses. In addition, the GI Bill paid for veterans college tuition, enabling many young working-class and lower-middle-class men to attend college. Thus, during the Cold War, many blue collar workers could afford homes in the suburbs that came complete with new kitchen appliances, new cars, television sets and summer vacations, and many developed the expectation that their children would graduate from high school and go on to college. The wives of such men did not have to work outside the home for pay if they did not wish to and could stay home to care for their children just as middle-class mothers did. Working-class children no longer needed to work in order to contribute to the family income. When they did work at part-time jobs, they kept all or part of their income and used it to buy clothing, magazines, record albums, movie tickets and cosmetics. Working-class teens were also more likely in the post-war period to graduate from high school, thus preparing themselves either for a well-paying blue collar job or for entry into a public college or university. These new opportunities made middle-class status either a reality or a not unrealistic aspiration for large numbers of Americans. Even among people proud of their working-class status or denied entry to the middle class because of racism, middle-class values were learned in school, and the pervasiveness of popular culture ensured that these lessons were reinforced outside the classroom as well. Thus, the middle-class standards that children were encouraged to adopt were familiar to people of all classes and ethnicities and undoubtedly influenced their lives even if they served only as a reminder of class or cultural differences. In order to incorporate the experiences of as large and diverse a group of Americans as possible, I have used a variety of sources. In addition to monographs on child rearing and education, I have also made extensive use of advice books, etiquette manuals and articles from popular magazines that were directed at both parents and children throughout the United States. These sources have been supplemented by material taken from newspapers published in all regions of the US so that as many perspectives, opinions and experiences of people of different class, regional and ethnic backgrounds might be incorporated. In order to capture the experience of children themselves, which is often hard to do given that most of what children produce is of an ephemeral nature and usually not preserved (even by the most doting parents) long beyond their childhood years, I have incorporated information from unpublished studies of the lives of children, especially adolescents; government studies; essays produced by children as part of school assignments; and the myriad forms of popular culture to which children and adolescents were exposed television shows, movies, popular music, romance and adventure magazines, comic books, toys, games and advertisements. Finally, I have made extensive use of the many educational films produced for and shown in American classrooms throughout the period. I have chosen to rely heavily on films not because I believe that they depict the real-

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The Politics of Childhood in Cold War America

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ity of American life but because they depict ideal behaviours that children were encouraged to imitate and strive to inculcate the values which adults of the time believed good, responsible citizens should possess. I also make use of these films because viewing them was a common experience shared by all American children regardless of sex, social class, religion, race or region. Although I examine only American childhood in this book, I do not mean to imply that the concerns Americans shared and the lessons they taught to their children were somehow unique to the United States. Adults in all countries instruct their children in the values and beliefs of their culture. Many nations attempt to evoke feelings of patriotism in the young. Educational films were shown in countries other than the US during the period under examination, and boys and girls who watched them learned about etiquette, dating and the mysteries of puberty. The movies and television shows that American children watched in the 1950s and 1960s were watched by children elsewhere in the world, and these children also played with many of the same toys that American children did. Certainly the US was not the only nation that worried about the spread of communism during the Cold War, and everyone worried about the possibility of nuclear war. However, the American experience of the Cold War was different. Others may have feared the advance of communism, but only the people of the US believed it was the divinely ordained role of Americans to stop the advance of the Soviet Union. Only in the US were lessons learned at home, in school and at play thought to be vital not only to the childs happiness and future success but also to the success of the nation and the very survival of the free world. Only Americans believed that love for ones country could save the world from nuclear annihilation and that their form of government would be the salvation of the world. In this way, the American experience during the Cold War was different in both degree and kind from the experience of those in other nations except perhaps for the Soviet Union. This book will begin where childrens lives begin: in the home. Chapter 1 discusses the child-rearing philosophy that exerted the greatest influence over Americans during the Cold War and the blessings and curses Americans believed accompanied the adoption of this style of raising ones children. I will also discuss the emergence of the other-directed personality during the post-World War II period and the implications of this for American society throughout the Cold War period. I will also examine the beliefs that Americans held regarding the children of the Soviet Union and the Soviet style of child rearing. The focus of Chapter 2 moves to the schools and explores how the desire to raise children with a specific set of values, ideals and personality traits, and the fear of communism and the Soviet Union influenced the lessons that children learned in American schools during this period. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which popular culture, play and leisure time activities for young Americans reinforced

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the lessons learned in school and prepared them to battle the communist menace. Chapter 4 focuses on gender expectations for children during the Cold War period and the ways in which parents, teachers, the purveyors of popular culture and others sought to ensure that boys and girls would grow into true men and real women who, through their adherence to proper gender roles, would guarantee the safety of the United States, maintain the social order and raise a new generation of future citizens to defend America in the decades to come. Chapter 5 discusses those who threatened the social order and the future of American society by rebelling against authority, rejecting the lessons learned in school and cultivating values that endangered the continued survival of the United States. Finally, in a brief conclusion, I will discuss how the Cold War consensus collapsed and the desire to raise children to serve the nations political goals came to an end.

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