The Cold War was a bone-chilling time.
While Americas can-do confidence offered us a sugar frosted promises of a future filled with frost-free fun and abundance, that giddy optimism co-existed with the very real fear of nuclear annihilation.
In the 1950s and ’60s most Americans assumed the US and the Soviets stood at all times on the brink of nuclear war.
I would catch a Cold war chill that I could never quite shake.
Copyright (©) 20012 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
The steamy summer of 1961 may have been sweltering, but the Cold War had moved into a deep freeze by July putting a glacial chill in the balmy summer air .
Hovering right beneath the surface of that sunny glow from our Coppertone tans was a bone chilling sense of foreboding.
Like an eerie portent of things to come, the number one song of summer, “Tossin n Turnin” could be heard reverberating from transistor radios on sun-drenched beaches coast to coast.
By the end of July, the nation itself would soon be tossin’ and turnin’ turnin’ and tossin’ at the terrifying thought of nuclear confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union over the heated up crisis in Berlin.
Berlin Crisis
With waves of East German refugees pouring into Free West Berlin, the border was closed leading to the eventual construction of the Berlin Wall.
The risk of a military conflict, one that seemed as if it could escalate at anytime to a terrifying confrontation between the 2 most powerful antagonists of the Cold war US and the Soviet Union, was at an all time high.
With an ego the size of his alleged nuclear arsenal, a volatile Nikita Khrushchev sounding remarkably like Fearless Leader on Rocky and Bullwinkle, boasted quite publicly that USSR thermonuclear strength was unmatchable, and would leave America and….. by extension me, in a cloud of radioactive dust.
Rattled, Americans were nervously twisting the night away as the jousting match between President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev escalated to an all time high.
GI Joe in Suburbia
While the world poised for a showdown of wits and wills between those two Cold war Warriors, much closer to home, my parents planned a big family barbecue
My father was CO in charge of the Barbeque Brigade.
While wives stayed safely behind the lines, the men folk were recruited and deployed to the front.
Well fortified to do battle with gin n’ tonics firmly in hand, they mobilized around the Weber grill in a primal huddle of their own as they anxiously awaited orders.
Like the infantry sent to do battle, these buttoned down bar-b-que enthusiasts, combat ready in their comfort-in-action-perma-press pants, gathered on all sides of the roaring fire.
The torch had indeed been passed to a new generation, our war hero President informed us, and passed directly into the hands of these bespectacled men in clingy ban-lon, all of whom had served our country in the Second World War.
Only 15 years earlier, this bunch of balding band of brothers, blissfully barbecuing in my backyard, had returned from that greatest of all wars in their GI issued haircuts, war-weary but triumphant to confetti and parades.
What they had done in the war and what the war had done to them was never discussed.
Hot Summer… Cold War Part II Next Post
Copyright (©) 20012 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved -Excerpt From Defrosting The Cold War:Fallout From My Nuclear family
As the world poised for a showdown between those 2 cold warriors the USA and the Soviet Union, the risk of military conflict between the 2 heated up the summer of 1961 over the crisis in Berlin. The city divided up between the victors of WWII was located deep in the Soviet occupied parts of Germany and now Soviets were threatening to drag it behind the iron curtain.
The fate of Nathans Hot Dogs hung in the balance.
That summer as the melodic sound of Connie Francis longingly asking “Where the boys are” drifted over the lilacs from a neighbor’s transistor radio, the men at my family barbecue could be found shvitzing over the red-hot coals of the grill, shooting the breeze.
When tired of arguing the un likelihood of NYC Mayor Robert Wagner running for a third term successfully without the backing of Tammany Hall, libations were replenished as the men brooded over the storm gathering in Berlin.
Sixteen years ago these sunburned suburban schmoozers had all been soldiers who had happily helped defeat Der Fuehrer.
Now with their missions done, their tooth- notched stainless steel rectangular dog tags with the letter H embossed on them safely tucked away, the roar of guns and bombs a dim memory displaced by the whirl of a Lawn Boy mower and the effervescent bubbling of Canada Dry quinine water, they seemed willing to risk nuclear war to protect the former capital of that former enemy country from the evil clutches of our former comrades in arms, the Russians.
As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet, the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazi had been seamlessly and swiftly re-routed to those God-less Russian Commies
Eagerly biting into a tongue scalding frankfurter hot off the grill, Moms cousin Milton, a short and stubby man, his GI regulation washboard abs having long gone AWOL leaving his ever-expanding belly stretching the outer limits of his Acrylan shirt, offered up a compelling reason why we needed to step up and protect West Berlin from the clutches of the soulless Russians.
“I have just one word for you-Nathans!” he stated firmly, gobbling his hot dog with as much gusto as he perceived the Soviets would gobble up Berlin.
The men nodded knowingly.
Ignoring the fact that the former Wehrmacht was a wonderland of wieners and wursts, its rowdy, German beer gardens filled with boisterous, red-faced patrons washing down their bratwurst with thirst quenching weizen glasses of dark amber Dinkel Acker, if Berlin got dragged behind the iron curtain, he argued, the poor Berliners would be deprived of one of life’s great pleasures-noshing on a Nathans hot dog.
No one needed reminding of that near-international incident a few years back when Averill Harriman went to the Soviet Union and was denied a simple request.
N.Y.’s patrician former governor had asked the hot dog mavens at Nathans to airmail their specialty to him in Soviet Union, but the heartless Russians stopped the shipment of juicy franks at the border, fearful perhaps that if they let the poor Soviet people get even a whiff of good American hot dogs they’d revolt.
Nathans it seems was banned behind the Iron Curtain.
That was ironic considering those Kings of Coney Island had once catered the big “Carving up the Post War World” party hosted by FDR at Yalta where along with Churchill and Stalin, the 3 big powers greedily chowed down on some red hots while redrawing the map.
Hot Summer ….Cold War Pt IV next post
Copyright (©) 20012 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved -Excerpt From Defrosting The Cold War:Fallout From MyNuclear Family
The mixed weapons deterrent mid -century US relied on as depicted in 1959 illustration in Life Magazine.”Current US defense plan illustrated by this painting relies on use of a mixed and varied force of weapons to deter Russians from attacking with growing stockpiles of missiles.”
Hot Summer… Cold War Pt. IV
With the pungent whiff of sizzling meat in the sixties summer air these cowboy cold warriors got into a heated discussion about the threat of Thermonuclear War and President Kennedy’s cry of a Missile Gap.
In 1961, the nation was on edge over the terrifying thought of nuclear confrontation between the Americans and the Soviets and everyone had their opinion
It wasn’t long before my suburban backyard was littered with lawn chair strategists, their lubricated states adding fuel to the fire.
Big Boys
With the crisis in Berlin heating up and the threat of a possible nuclear attack breathing down our neck’s, some of the men loudly argued that we needed to build up our arsenal of missiles, mach schnell !
Short and pudgy, Nikita Khrushchev wasn’t coy about his ample arsenal of missiles, and relished brandishing his bombs at every opportunity.
The blustering Soviet Premier may have boasted that he could turn out long-range missiles “like sausages in an assembly line,” but, Dad joked, scooping the blistering dogs off the grill tucking them into doughy enriched buns, he could brandish his beef bayonets against anyone’s!
Since my grandfather had bestowed us with cases of hot dogs Dad winked, he could go wiener to wiener with Chairman Khrushchev anytime!
The prospects of Russian ICBM’s wiping out US Deterrent. This 1959 painting in Life Magazine illustrates “the disaster the Air Force experts fear could overtake the Us in 1962 unless it revises its military budget now to produce many ICBM’s”
Breathing deeply of the burning scorched beef, the men were fully confident that John Kennedy was pure protein.
Loaded with vigor and brimming with good health a can-do John Kennedy erupted , with energy like uranium atoms in fission -thanks to the daily cocktail of B-12 shots he received from Dr Feel-Good.
He would flex his muscles and build up our anemic arsenal of Missiles, along with beefing up our armies combat- ready- units to einmarsch right into Berlin.
“There would be no shrinkage on his watch”, said Cousin Jerry a bouncy, beefy man with a ready chuckle.
To those still concerned that our cool president was a little too tepid, the mere mention of JFK’s newly anointed Air Force Chief of Staff would dispel any lingering doubts.
For pure, unadulterated protein power, Jerry stated, hungrily ravaging his right of the grill burger “no one offered up more pep per serving than, cigar ‘chompin-bomb droppin’, abrasive General “Bomb em back to the stone age-Curtis Le May.
As Jerry bit deeply into the nearly raw meat, I watched in fascination as the rivulets of bloody juices dribbled down the precipice of his double chins leaving an oil slick in their wake.
The missile rattling grew loud and they were off to the races.
Copyright (©) 20012 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved -Excerpt From Defrosting The Cold War:Fallout From My Nuclear Family
The vintage Fallout Shelter Handbook by Chuck West depicts the Concrete Block Shelter so popular with smart suburbans. The interior looks as fresh and modern as any 1960s suburban home.
Hot Summer…Cold War Pt V
The first cracks in my mid-century American dream appeared some 50 years ago this summer.
Raising the heat of the Cold War a tense President Kennedy appeared on National television 51 years ago this week urging Americans to build fallout shelters in event of a possible thermonuclear war.
July 25th 1961 started out ordinary enough.
After an exhausting rainy day of refereeing my brother and me and our countless clashes, Mom rolled the portable TV set into her bedroom that Tuesday evening, hoping for a bit of distraction from the strain of the stormy day.
Adjusting the antennae that zipped out oh-so-easily from the “scano-tenna’ handle, she was grateful that the new TV set miraculously eliminated interference caused by appliances, automobiles and anytime a neighbor used his power drill; if only, she cracked to Dad, it would help block out the interference from their two children.
Mom could have used the comic relief provided by Red Skelton to help her unwind; his silly slapstick usually held the 10 o clock time slot, but she was content to watch his summer replacement -”The Purex Special for Women”.
Decades before the airing of Americas dirty laundry became the norm, this highly acclaimed series of soapy pseudo docudramas geared to the housewife dealt with intimate topics rarely talked about on television or anywhere else for that matter.
Checking the TV Guide listing, Mom noted with interest that tonight’s explosive installment was entitled: “The Cold Woman” starring a hot Kim Hunter as a frigid woman.
A Cold War Drama
But it too was preempted by a real life cold war drama starring our hot-blooded-cold warrior president (who not incidentally, some thought might be more suited to handling a frigid woman than a cold war.)
In just the past few months JFK had taken some serious blows to his formidable self-confidence.
After the fiasco of botching the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, our young president was plagued with self doubts. And in June, a jet setting JFK had returned shaken not stirred from his Vienna summit with Khrushchev who smugly assumed he was dealing with a novice, leaving many Americans troubled by JFK’s lack of gravitas and inexperience in handling a hot crisis .
Nuclear Bomb Jitters
Temporary Basement Fallout Shelter built from Civil Defense plans. The structure was based on the same plan as the Concrete Block shelter but was constructed with less permanent materials. The walls were made of stacked wood and sandbags to provide shielding against radiation. Do I feel a headache coming on?
Mom and Dad watched tensely as a grim get-tough JFK spoke to us live from the White House in his own version of a fireside chat. Though handsome as any movie star, Mom noticed his face appeared puffy, his hands seeming to tremble slightly as he shuffled papers in front of him.
But there was no tremor in his voice as he somberly spoke about the developing crisis in Berlin.
The city divided up between the victors of WWII was located deep in the Soviet occupied parts of Germany and now the Soviets were threatening to drag it behind the Iron Curtain.
Looking right into the camera, he relayed some chilly news.
Berlin was in an uproar, and hinted it could mean war- and thermonuclear war at that.
Thinking The Unthinkable
In a take it or leave it brusqueness, a volatile Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy informed us, had cold bloodily boasted that USSR thermonuclear strength was unmatchable, and could leave America in a cloud of radioactive dust.
The President laid it on the line that we were ready to fight if forced to, urging Americans to build bomb shelters.
Citizens should be ready to protect their own families.
Whether decorating your new den or planning your family’s survival, you could have ease of mind
Shuddering at the ominous tone I absorbed it all. For those who remembered war and those who like me at six years old merely heard of it, the president’s speech was 31 minutes of hard-hitting, sobering talk.
Suddenly it seemed, my safe suburban backyard with its styled-for-comfort-ease-of -living could flare up in flames.
The next morning neighbors spilled out from their stuffy split levels after a collective case of cabin fever. Do-It- Yourselfers were out in full force once again tackling half completed projects egged on by nagging wives. One neighbor prudently eyed a pallet of bricks once slated for a built-in barbecue was now re-evaluating their use for the more practical construction of a fall out shelter instead.
As others were thinking the unthinkable, I tried not to think.
During the next few days everyone’s nerves were having a time of it as the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962 escalated.
Along with the rest of the country, my parents anxiously followed the formation of Kennedy’s Cuban Quarantine during the Missile Crisis. The time had come for a direct military showdown with the Soviet Union.
The war mongers were busy beating their tom toms.
Most felt the Soviets had crossed the line on this one. They had come into our hemisphere, their nuclear warheads aimed directly at us and we had to make sure they didn’t strike first. Folks didn’t expect the Soviets to remove their missiles and bombers, so sooner or later we would have to go in and then the Russians would retaliate.
As the tension mounted, many atomic armchair strategists felt strongly that the best defense was offense- get ‘em before they hit us. “If the Russian offensive build up continued, Kennedy would have no choice but to unleash the mighty US force.” Dad said gravely.
On Wednesday, when Soviet ships changed course rather than make contact with the naval blockade, there was some relief. No new weapons were being shipped to Cuba. But Hi-ho-hi-ho it was off to work they go as industrious red dwarfs continued to work day and night on the existing missiles which would soon be operational.
Collage by Sally Edelstein
School officials were now scurrying to make all sorts of contingency plans for what seemed like the possibility of a real attack.
Still confined to my bedroom with German measles, I would hear the ominous sound of the air raid drill alarm ringing at West Hempstead High School a few blocks away, every few hours.
I could picture all the frightened school kids jumping out of their desks as I had done countless times, kneeling underneath desks, hands clasped behind necks, eyes closed waiting for that imminent flash.
That afternoon, my fifth grade brother brought home from school mimeographed maps of the cities upon which were superimposed ominous bulls eyes showing the lethal reach of the bombs.
In school they had developed a plan for evacuating elementary school kids in the event of a threatened enemy air raid upon NYC. In case of emergency it was thought better to be incinerated at home rather than at school.
Our teacher had handed out printed permission slips to take home and have our parents sign, allowing us to walk home in a practice walk-home drill. Earlier in the school year we had been issued plastic dog tags with our picture and address on it that we were to wear in case of emergency, and now we would actually get to wear them.
Disappointed that I’d be left out of the big march, Mom let me out of my sick room long enough so I could watch from the living room window as all my classmates, lined up in size order, silently marched down my deserted block on their practice drill.
The loud roar of an overhead jet temporarily distracted me. Anxiously I scanned the skies from our picture window for an enemy attack, as though it were WWII and I were a spotter standing on a rooftop scanning the skies for the sight of a Japanese flag painted on the belly of the aircraft.
I was too young to comprehend the total annihilation of nuclear war. All I knew was, we were to be prepared. I knew a nuclear attack could occur any time anyplace any day. Would this be the day?
I squinted into the bright sky as if somehow I would spot the sickle and hammer of the Soviet plane, straining to hear the whirl of a 4 engine Russian bomber, certain that it was the one carrying the bomb.
Somewhere out there the enemy was approaching. My parents would shake their heads, as they watched me, but neither of them had the heart to tell me what they already knew- that now, by the time you eyed the enemy…it was already too late.
Copyright (©) 2012 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
(R) Vintage travel poster tours in Soviet Union Crimea
A Soviet Spring Vacation
Sadly spring break in Siberia is now off-limits to Senator John McCain and other US Representatives thanks to Vladimir Putin’s retaliatory sanctions.
Oh, for the good old days of the Soviet Union when American capitalists were once welcomed with open arms.
Vintage Travel Poster Soviet Union 1930s Intourist
It’s hard to imagine but back in 1930’s, the USSR was a destination vacation
Tourism to Soviet in the interwar years is usually thought of as a smattering of intellectuals, and fellow travelers. But it wasn’t just the idealist leftists who wanted to take a vacation in the USSR.
It was red-blooded American businessmen.
Before the cold war froze out tourism, Soviet Russia actively wooed American tourists.
The Soviets tapped into travel dreams of Americans and the flow of American tourists to the Soviet Union in the 1930s helped turn tourism into a mass market industry. (R) Vintage Travel Poster Intourist for Soviet Union Tours 1930s (L) Vintage ad vacation in Chevrolet 1930s
To help sell the Soviet Union as a travel destination to Americans during the interwar years, Joseph Stalin created Intourist in 1929 as the official state travel agency of Soviet Union. Not only was it a full service travel agency offering tours, it peddled an idealized vision of the Soviet State to foreigners.
Through a barrage of advertisements, posters and brochures, the USSR was sold as a utopian state, a country of the future “a Land of Color and Progress.”
Intourist ads enticed tourists painting a picture of a land in transition. ‘See the immense activity, new building, social work of the worlds most discussed country and at reduced rates.”
This was “a country of the future, consisting of millions of peoples from various backgrounds working together to build a future brighter than the backwards past.”
What could be more appealing to red white and blue Americans.
March 1932 cover Fortune magazine The ” Great Soviet Experiment” even rated a cover story, painted by Diego Rivera. The accompanying article fairly rhapsodized on the marvels of Soviet system.
What better place to raise the profile of the USSR than in the pages of that most Capitalist of magazines Fortune. At a hefty 10 dollars yearly subscription ( nearly a hundred dollars today), this magazine was not geared to your average “fellow traveler.”
It may seem incongruous to find an ad for the Soviet Union in the glossy pages of Henry Luce’s homage to American business. But nestled between ads for luxury cars, boats and brokerage houses, Intourist placed advertisements in nearly every issue of the mammoth monthly magazine.
This ad appeared in Fortune April 1932,
,
“Visit the new and the old in highly individual cities of Soviet Russia where gigantic new planning is altering social forms and yet preserving the notable art treasures of older times,” entices the copy in this ad from April 1932.
” Leningrad with its palaces and “Hermitage art gallery…Moscow with its famous Kremlin and intense activity…Rostov with its enormous collective farming and communal life with theaters clubs and sports fields…Kiev with its byzantine art and Ukrainian music and theater.”
“Intourist provides everything hotels meals all transportation Soviet visa and an English-speaking guide. The price of $192 is for second class 2 together $240 for one alone. Greatly reduced fares for 3 or 4 together.”
(R) Vintage travel poster to Soviet Union from Intourist 1939
The seductive copy from an Intourist brochure from 1939 beckons:
“Today you need no magic carpet, no store of riches to travel. If you but choose your journey carefully thoughtfully, new horizons open up before you…And where are horizons wider and more promising than in the Soviet Union? Here in a land of vastness and infinite variety, is the fulfillment of your brightest travel dreams.”
Travel dreams would open up other horizons as well.
Besides the art treasures and diverse beauty of the Soviet Union, some red-blooded American were also interested in lining their pockets.
Though diplomatic relations between the 2 nations would not be established before 1933 when FDR chose to formally recognize Stalin’s Communist government (ending almost 16 years of American non-recognition of the Soviet Union), American business were already busy tapping into this large market.
The US had refused to recognize the government in Moscow after the Bolsheviks took control in 1917.
Despite the Red Scare here at home throughout the 1920s, Washington gradually lifted overseas trade and investment opportunities for American business in Russia.
Soviet Russia soon became a major America market.
By 1930 American exports to Russia exceeded in value those of every other country and naturally Americana business relied on this export market. Not surprisingly most experts agree that this commercial and economic relationship strongly influenced formal recognition.
We may have been scared of Red but we loved green.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Steeped in fear, some Americans have a nasty habit of marking an entire people as pre-disposed to disloyalty. After WWII, as my future husband and his family of Holocaust survivors lingered in an overcrowded Displaced Persons Camp in Germany waiting for a country that would accept them, politicians and a fear mongering media debated the loyalty of Eastern Europeans and the fear of Communist infiltration. Many were convinced that Communists had infiltrated DP camps posing as refugees in order to enter the country where they would soon overthrow the government. All were suspect including this homeless little boy on the left who would one day grow up to be my husband. Did I marry a communist ? Not in the least. (L) My 3-year-old husband in a DP Camp 1948 photo family collection (R) 1949 movie poster “I Married a Communist”
A Threat to America
Fear mongering media and xenophobic politicians cry out in protest at the possible influx of refugees seeking a safe haven.
Squawking like Chicken Little, they ominously warn of the dire consequences and threat to America if we allow “these tired, these poor, these huddled masses” of refugees ‘yearning to breathe free” into our homeland.
These particular refugees they assert “are supporters of terrorism, violence and the abrogation of American laws and ideals…they will take over the country and subvert our constitution.”,
“Taking in these refugees would be suicide for the US because anti-American terrorists may be disguising themselves as refugees.”
A lawmaker opposing these immigrants claims they are “imbued with political ideologies wholly at variance with our constitutional system!”
Testimony before Congress offered grave warnings that these refugees were “important carriers of the kind of ideological germs with which it is their aim to infect the public opinion of the US.”
Now that certainly sounds like a diagnosis from the good doctor, Ben Carson.
“Is this Tommorrow?” A panel from the 1947 anti communist comic book designed to teach people about the subversive nature of communism.
Only the speaker here was not directing his paranoia at the fear of a Muslim terrorist sneaking into the U.S. along with the Syrian refugees.
These remarks were uttered over 65 years ago about another group of refugees seeking asylum, East European refugees.
This fear mongering that sounds straight out of the right-wing playbook on Anti-Muslim refugees is actually a page from the cold war anti-communist rhetoric directed at the displaced persons of WWII.
The current resistance to the 4 million Syrian refugees fleeing a violent homeland desperate to seek a safe haven, mirrors the deep freeze experienced by displaced placed Eastern European Jews during the cold war whose efforts to get to a safe haven were met by a cold shoulder.
The cold war cast a particularly chilly response to the desperate plight of the displaced person of Europe due to our heightened fear of Communist infiltration.
Thanks to the peddling of irrational fears to a panicked and paranoid public, many post war Americans were resistant to the idea of welcoming these poor souls to our shores.
Displaced Persons in a DP Camp, Germany 1947
Well into the post war years, thousands of European Jews remained locked in displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria. Without a home, many were afraid to be repatriated because their countries were now police states under Soviet occupation.
For these ¼ million stateless, homeless Jewish survivors, prospects for resettlement in free democratic lands appeared uncertain.
These huddled masses yearning to be free had nowhere to go.
It is a story that hits close to home.
My future in-laws were Holocaust survivors.
Displaced persons camp, Germany 1946. My future mother in law and her son, my future husband who would spend the first 4 years of his life in a DP camp. Photo: family collection. With a broad brush many have painted all Muslims as terrorists, so it was with the Eastern Europeans and the assumption of being communists sympathizers.
While my childhood was a sugar frosted world of frost-free fun living out the post war suburban dream, my husband would spend the first four years of his life in a displaced persons camp, while Congress bickered unwilling to change existing restrictive immigration laws that severely limited the number of Eastern European allowed.
Cast in a cold war light, these refugees became in even less desirable.
Part of that opposition was fueled, as it is now, by stereotypes of the refugees as harbingers of a dangerous ideology, in this case Communism.
By the beginning of 1947, the composition of the DP camps had changed.
The camps were very overcrowded due to the daily influx of Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing oppressive Soviet occupation. 250,000 Eastern European Jews including large numbers of families and children from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Soviet Union joined the other displaced persons of the Holocaust.
As my husband and his family lingered in an overcrowded DP camp waiting for a country that would accept them, politicians and a fear mongering media debated the loyalty of Eastern Europeans and the fear of communist infiltration.
Warning! Danger Ahead
An ant-communist comic book warning young readers of the dangers ahead should Uncle Sam steer clear of the Rd Iceberg
By 1947 relations between the Soviet Union and U.S. were in the deep freeze; the cold war was frozen solid.
In the black and white cold war world war of good vs evil, America was certain that the communists were waging an aggressive campaign of hatred against us embarking upon an aggressive campaign to destroy free government and American way of life.
from the 1947 anti communist comic book “Is This Tomorrow?” warning people of the subversive nature of Communist infiltration
Uncle Sam was convinced that Russia was hell-bent on destroying the traditional American way of Life and had their cunning communist eyes set on infiltrating America with whatever means they could.
American feared being infected with a good case of communism. (R) Is This Tomorrow a 1947 comic book designed to teach people about the subversive nature of communist infiltration.
The very health of democracy was at stake, unless these morally corrupting influences were wiped out and banned from our shores.
More frightening than polio was the spread of that ideological virus communism.
And the displaced persons camps were prime breeding grounds for this subversive cunning germ.
The president of the National Economic Council testified in Congress that the DPs were “important carriers of the kind of ideological germs with which it is their aim to infect the public opinion of the U.S. ”
It was a virulent strain of ideology that once exposed, there was no cure. We needed to quarantine the public from the spread of this dangerous virus.
Crafty subversive plotters training for their roles as peddlers of Soviet propaganda, skillfully disguise themselves as refugees in a DP camp 1947 . Photo family collection
Just as germs entered the bloodstream undetected so Communists could infiltrate and attack. “Skillfully disguising themselves as refugees,” one article warned, “carrying out their mission these communists spend years in training for their subversive roles, poised to slip in a neat hypodermic needle full of Moscow virus.”
In a DP camp in Germany a group of Junior revolutionaries plotting for seizure and power in the USA. Photo- family collection
Many were convinced Communists had infiltrated the DP camps, posing as refugees in order to enter the country where they would soon overthrow the government.
People testified in Congress that the Soviets had placed “trained terrorists’ ( trained at terrorists institutions in Moscow) in the DP camps .
Is that a concealed weapon in that snow ball? A 2 year old displaced child in DP camp Germany. Photo Family collection
It was therefore likely that many DP camps admitted from Europe would include a number of these terrorists. Alarmists feared that DPs were Soviet “Trojan Horses bent on the nations destruction.”
Natural Tendencies
As a reflection of their “natural tendencies” the perceived politics of the DPs thus posed a threat to American nation.
Many Congressmen opposed DP immigration equating these “New Immigrants” with anarchism, communism and Bolshevism, recklessly claiming the DPs were “imbued with political ideologies wholly at variance with our constitutional system of government.”
Who Can You Trust
What it boiled down to was loyalty and trust calling in to question the loyalty of immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Marking an entire people as pre disposed to disloyalty is a familiar refrain.
Once here, the DPs ( from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe) would be “peculiarly susceptible to the absorption of socialistic propaganda” and naturally gravitate into “left wing unions” and the immigrant slums which were “mothers of revolution.”
Opponents of DP immigration often spoke of how the DPs and the “ideological germs” that they carried would weaken the nation from within, echoing fears of “race suicide” that had been so prevalent in debates about immigration earlier in the century.
However as time went on President Harry Truman stood up against the public opinion and Congress in his battle to open the door of the U.S. to Jewish DPs. He urged Congress to enact legislation that would admit thousands of homeless and suffering refugees of all faiths to the U.S.
After pressure, Congress passed the less than magnanimous 1948 Displaced Person Act ( an act to authorize for a limited time the admission into the U.S. 200,00 of certain European displaced persons) which was highly selective using date restrictions designed to limit the number of Jewish refugees eligible for entry.
President Truman when he signed it, grudgingly admitted it was better than nothing, but called it “flagrantly discriminatory” against Jews and Catholics. 1
Many began seeing the propaganda potential of DPs that could be exploited and that they be touted through the U.S. as “Victims of Communism.”
As more refuges were being admitted, a cold war re-branding of the DPs began to take hold. In the war against communism they could use their plight to our advantage.
One document suggested a technique for fighting Communism in the USA strongly recommending “that the propaganda potential of DPs be exploited and that they be touted through the U.S. as Victims of Communism.”
The obvious fact that the DPs who might technically be able to return to their East European homelands refused to do so because of feared Communist rule, had somehow previously eluded them.
Many folks began to realize that far from destroying the nation from within, the politics of the DPs especially their anti-communist feelings could strengthen the nation in its conflict with the Soviet Union.
For many of the proponents of DP immigration, the DPs did not represent the communist contagion but rather the anti-communism inoculation.
They would be living proof of the terrors and horrors of Communist rule.
In its final report the USDPC urged the resettlement of refugees from communist tyranny should become part of Cold War U.S. Strategy.
These displaced persons served to remind us of the dangers of totalitarian communism!
Coming to America 1949 Photo family collection
In the fall of 1949 a few months before a relatively unknown senator from Wisconsin began his 4 year witch hunt for Communists, my future husband and what remained of his family arrived in the states from their DP camp in Germany.
After a ten-day crossing from Bremerhaven, Germany, the ship steamed into NY Harbor. On board were other displaced persons some were survivors of concentration camps others refugees from Russian persecution.
Some were so old that they had little to look forward to except burial at last in American earth; others like my husband, so young that soon they would have no recollection at all of Europe. But all of them felt grateful to the country that had finally given them a safe haven.
Only 4 years old, Hersh who had spent almost all his life behind barbed wire was able to adjust quickly, learning phrases that would take his parents months to learn.
His first experience here was watching Hop Along Cassidy on TV. This little 4 year boy who could only speak Yiddish donned a cowboy hat and learned the language watching good old American westerns.
As his parents watched him change from a displaced person with a number into an American, they beamed with happiness.
Today this former unwanted refugee is an attorney defending those most in need of help, whose eloquence owed a lot to those 1950s cowboy and the generosity of America for welcoming him.
1. Note: So much criticism was heaped on the 1948 Act that Congress later passed amendments extending allotment of US immigration visas for DPs to approximately 500,000.
The 1950 revision succeeded including treating all European refugees “equally as members of the human race” as the NY Times said in an editorial at the time.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Syrian Refugee Crisis – Is It Deja Vi All Over Again
A hot dog can make you lose control
Hot dogs, that very symbol of culinary democracy took on a special meaning during the cold war, especially in the summer of 1961.
The fate of Nathans Hot Dogs hung in the balance.
Backyard barbecues
Summer barbecues were a family staple in my childhood suburban backyard, and they often took on the precision of a military exercise.
With the precision used to plan a bombing mission in the south pacific, Dad calculated the wind velocity, temperature and cloud coverage when making the perfect fire, skills learned as a meteorologist in the Army Air Corp while serving in New Guinea.
While wives stayed safely behind the lines, the men folk were recruited and deployed to the front, where Dad was CO in charge of the Barbecue Brigade.
Well fortified to do battle with gin and tonics firmly in hand, they mobilized around the Weber grill in a primal huddle of their own as they anxiously awaited orders.
Like the infantry sent to do battle, these buttoned down bar-b-que enthusiasts, combat ready in their comfort-in- action-perma- press Bermuda shorts, gathered on all sides of the roaring fire.
The torch had indeed been passed to a new generation, our war hero President Kennedy had informed us, and passed directly into the hands of these bespectacled men in clingy ban-lon, all of whom had served our country in the Second World War.
Strategically wielding the Big Boy barbecue tongs, Dad was ready for any BBQ maneuver. A king size cigarette dangling from his lips, barbecue apron round his regulation plaid Bermuda shorts, his smart masculine styling rated a fashion 21 gun salute.
That summer as the melodic sound of Connie Francis longingly asking “Where the Boys Are” drifted over the lilacs from a neighbor’s transistor radio, the men at my family barbecue could be found shvitzing over the red-hot coals of the grill, shooting the breeze.
When tired of arguing the un likelihood of N.Y.C Mayor Robert Wagner running for a third term successfully without the backing of Tammany Hall, libations were replenished as the men brooded over the storm gathering in Berlin.
As the world poised for a showdown between those two cold warriors the USA and the Soviet Union, the risk of military conflict between them heated up that summer of 1961 over the crisis in Berlin. The city divided up between the victors of WWII was located deep in the Soviet occupied parts of Germany and now the Soviets were threatening to drag it behind the iron curtain.
Only sixteen years ago these sunburned suburban schmoozers had all been soldiers who had happily helped defeat Der Fuehrer in that greatest of all wars WWII.
Now with their missions done, their tooth-notched stainless steel rectangular dog tags with the letter H embossed on them safely tucked away, the roar of guns and bombs a dim memory now displaced by the whirl of a Lawn Boy mower and the effervescent bubbling of Canada Dry quinine water, they seemed willing to risk nuclear war to protect the former capital of that former enemy country from the evil clutches of our former comrades in arms, the Russians.
As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet, the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazi had been seamlessly and swiftly re-routed to those God-less Russian Commies.
Eagerly biting into a tongue scalding frankfurter hot off the grill, Mom’s cousin Milton, a short and stubby man, his GI regulation washboard abs having long gone AWOL leaving his ever-expanding belly stretching the outer limits of his Acrylan shirt, offered up a compelling reason why we needed to step up and protect West Berlin from the clutches of the soulless Russians.
“I have just one word for you-Nathan’s!” he stated firmly, gobbling his hot dog with as much gusto as he perceived the Soviets would gobble up Berlin.
The men nodded knowingly.
Vintage Schlitz Beer Ad
Ignoring the fact that the former Wehrmacht was a wonderland of wieners and wursts, its rowdy, German beer gardens filled with boisterous, red-faced patrons washing down their bratwurst with thirst quenching weizen glasses of dark amber Dinkel Acker, if Berlin got dragged behind the iron curtain, he argued, the poor Berliners would be deprived of one of life’s great pleasures – noshing on a Nathan’s hot dog.
No one needed reminding of that near-international incident a few years back when Assistant Secretary of State Averill Harriman went to the Soviet Union and was denied a simple request.
N.Y.’s patrician former governor had asked the hot dog mavens at Nathans to airmail their specialty to him in Soviet Union, but the heartless Russians stopped the shipment of juicy franks at the border, fearful perhaps that if they let the poor Soviet people get even a whiff of good American hot dogs they’d revolt.
Nathans was banned behind the Iron Curtain.
Nathan’s of Coney Island
That was ironic considering those same Nathan franks had once catered the big “Carving up the Post War World” party hosted by FDR at Yalta where along with Churchill and Stalin, the 3 big powers greedily chowed down on some red hots while redrawing the map. Only a few years earlier, Roosevelt had successfully served those “Kings of Coney Island” to British royalty, the King and Queen of England at his home in Hyde Park.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev enjoying a hot dog in Iowa when visited in September 1959.
The poor Russians may have been deprived of a good American dog, but that didn’t stop Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev from enjoying a hot dog on U.S. soil when he visited in the fall of 1959. During the same trip in which he promised to “bury us” pounding his shoe on a podium of the UN, the rotund premier devoured his first American hot dog in Iowa declaring it “excellent.”
Tear Down That wall.
Thirty years later as the Cold War began to thaw in 1989, not only did the Berlin Wall finally come down, but Muscovites could finally chow down on some genuine Nathans hot dogs. That same year as the wall fell, the cry of “Get your red hots comrades” could be heard when Nathan’s began selling their famous dogs in the heart of Red Square. Credit Perestroika for helping to bring the King of Dogs to the Soviet Union.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Putin’s Puppet? The rampant distrust and the recent Russian election bombshell has caused my cold war chill to get a lost frostier.
Is the Cold War being taken out of deep freeze?
The accusations of Russia’s interference in our presidential election has sent a big chill down my spine, as childhood memories of the Cold War are quickly defrosted. As distrust and accusations run rampant, the terror of the Red Menace infiltrating our country, is bone chillingly familiar.
The CIA has recently concluded that Russia and Vladimir Putin have interfered with the US election in order to help Donald Trump become president.
It is a familiar cold war doomsday scenario brought into the 21st century.
Red Menace
The fear of Russian intervention, not only militarily but politically was a common thread throughout my mid-century childhood. American’s were convinced hidden communists were lurking everywhere, secretly infiltrating our government, including our very own state department.
Like those two scheming cartoon villains Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale those no goodnick spies carrying out Fearless Leaders secret evil plots, Russians were sinister, sneaky plotters carrying out covert actions just waiting to overthrow a government…including our own.
Russian Menace
Now the possibility that the Russians have stolen the White House for Donald Trump, the candidate handpicked by comrade Putin, is a scenario eerily straight out of the any number of post war cautionary tales.
Even the techniques they used, misinformation and manipulation of the press, creating divisiveness while pitting citizens against each other to weaken us, are the exact same devices we were warned were favored by the Soviets to undermine us:
“His aim is to make you hate your fellow-man and keep you blind to the important things in life. He wants to make you forget the importance of your right to vote as you please—to say what you please—to go where you please.”
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
One famous 1947 comic book entitled “Is This Tomorrow – America Under Communism” was an over the top tale typical of the time alerting us of the dangers of a Russian takeover. Over 48 colorful pages it illustrated just how easy it would be for the Reds to take over the U.S.
The comic opens with a dire warning to the young reader:
IS THIS TOMORROW is published for the one purpose – TO MAKE YOU THINK! To make you more alert to the menace of Communism. “Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
Taking their orders directly from Moscow, the story revolves around a group of American Communists led by a man named “Jones” and his propaganda advisor “Brown” a sinister Steve Banyon character who explains how they will manipulate the American media as a precursor to their Kremlin approved takeover of the U.S.
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
They manipulate strike leaders, and stoke racial, class and religious hatred to help weaken America for the Communists eventual takeover.
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
Race baiting and taking advantage of the things that divided this country worked to their advantage.
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
After the plot to assassinate the president and vice president is successful, the party operatives have successfully infiltrated the government and Jones controls the Speaker of the House (who now is the new president ). Behind the scenes Jones becomes the”Chief Advisor” and expands the Executive Powers.
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
Destabilizing journalism as a check on the power of government is quickly implemented. Anyone critical is swiftly punished and unfavorable newspapers are denied newsprint until they agree with the party line. Telephone system and radio network are now nationalized.
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
“Is This Tomorrow” published by Catechetical Guild Educational Society 1947
INCREDIBLE?
“Did our story seem incredible? It is unbelievable—that such a small group could ever dream of enforcing its will upon the majority. But remember that a group for smaller than the number of Communists living and working in America today seized control of Russia in 1917.
No one can refuse to believe what he knows to be true. And we do know that every method shown in this presentation has been used by the Communists in their rise to power in other countries. Starvation, murder, slavery, force—those are the tools the Communists use to carry out the doctrine of Communism.
The Communists are preparing to seize control of America in any crisis. This crisis, real or contrived—will be there signal to move in… and make their bid for power.
This crisis might begin with a flood in Pennsylvania—a drought in the Middle West. Or it might begin with a general strike in some of our large industrial cities—New York—Detroit—Chicago—San Francisco.
It happened in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and country after country, the world over.
WHERE DO YOU COME IN?
You are the one with whom the Communist is struggling right now. His aim is to make you hate your fellow man and keep you blind to the important things in life. He wants to make you forget the importance of your right to vote as you please—to say what you please—to go where you please—to worship as you please. The Communist really wants you to forget all your rights to individual freedom and liberty.
But you cannot assume your individual rights without assuming individual responsibility.
If you want to keep on living, you must know who the Communists are—and their methods of working. You must recognize the Communist Party line in action and separate Communist propaganda from the factual news of the day.
You are on the defensive in this battle. You owe it to yourself to know all about the invader. He knows more about you than you suspect.
Laughable for its inplausibility, it’s not quite so funny now.
Are the Russians coming? It look like they are already here.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
“Defrosting the Cold War” collage by Sally Edelstein
Is the Cold War coming out of the deep freeze?
Having caught a Cold War chill I never could quite shake, the current frosty relations between President Obama and Russia’s Vladimir Putin send a shiver down my spine, as childhood memories of the Cold War are quickly defrosted.
The deepening mistrust and accusations of lying between the US and Russia feels like deja vu all over again.
During the Cold War, Uncle Sam was certain that the Soviets were not only concealing the truth but waging a campaign of hatred against us and our peaceful motives and quickly embarked on his own campaign to dispel the evil lies and promote the American Way of life.
The American media was more than happy to oblige and lend a hand in propagating the facts.
(L) Freedom Foundation Ad 1961 “Freedom Foundation was founded in 1949 to help maintain the American way and pass it on intact to each generation. You can strike an effective blow against Communism by joining Freedom Foundations For Americanism program”
(R) How Communists Implement the Party Line illustration from “What is Communism” edited by Richard Ketchum 1955
“The poor people behind the iron curtain,” Americans were warned in public service ads, “have seen such political wickedness and cold-blooded betrayal, such Godless depravity in government that they find it harder to believe in our own good intentions.”
“To destroy human liberty and to control the world the communists use every conceivable weapon subversion, bribery corruption, even… military attack!
“Of all these,” the ad said sternly, “none is more insidious than propaganda!”
(L) Vintage Radio Free Europe Ad 1950’s (R) vintage children’s school book illustration from ” Working Together” by Alta McIntire & Wilhelmina Hill 1954
Counter attacking these malicious falsehood and spreading the American Way of Life were the Cold War crusaders of truth from “The Crusade for Freedom” the privately funded donation drive that raised “truth dollars” to support Radio Free Europe.
The radio station broadcast news and current affairs to the enslaved people behind the Iron Curtain, broadcasting over 29 transmitters to reach Poles, Czechoslovakia, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians.
Supported by the voluntary cooperative action of millions of Americans who were, the RFE declared, “engaged in this fight of good versus evil.”
“Truth Dollars,” they explained in one of their many ads,”send words of truth and hope to 70 million freedom loving people behind the Iron curtain.”
“This powerful privately operated organization continually challenge the barrage of Communist misstatements and false truth,” they continued proudly. “RFE is constantly on the offensive against the Red campaign to annihilate right, reason and national pride.”
By both promoting the American way of Life and exposing the calculated lies that Communists were spreading every hour, every day through Soviet controlled broadcast and newspaper Radio Free Europe became a vital strategy in winning the Cold War.
(L) Vintage American Legion Magazine Aug. 1948 featuring helpful article “The Way You can Fight Communism” (R) Vintage Radio Free Europe Poster Crusade For Freedom 1950’s
For my very first July Fourth in 1956, I would get to hear the cold war truth from them directly.
All across Long island, residents were a buzz over the fact that our towns July 4th parade was being co-sponsored by those Cold war crusaders of truth from “The Crusade For Freedom.” The highlight of the day was the much-anticipated rally that would follow.
A heavy fog had blanketed out town that Independence Day but did not put a damper on the festivities.
As my family and I waited for the speeches to begin, we squeezed in between other newly transplanted families. Indistinguishable from one another but for the different fun to wear easy to care California inspired geometric patterns on their Robert hall no iron Dacron clothes, the wives were a chatty gaggle of amber waves of trouble-free Toni home permanents that had not unfurled in the humidity.
Their you-don’t- know-how -lucky- you-are-to-live-in-the country-children, romped in the fog that hovered over them. A colorful bunch of boisterous backyard buckaroos with cap firing pistols and sputtering sparklers, their purple lick-em- ade stained tongues and lips stood in contrast to their little bodies dotted with pink splotches of dried calamine lotion, that would be the only hint of pink in this all American crowd.
The fog like a veil of secrecy swirled around the large glistening “Freedom Bell” proudly on display near the Legion Halls flag pole. On loan from The Crusade for Freedom, the bell was authentic in every detail and was cast at a foundry very near the original Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
A public Service Ad by The Advertising Council 1951 “How would you like to roll out of bed some dark morning and have a big palooka tell you where you’re going to work that week, what your wife’s going to wear, and what your kids have to do?” That’s life under Communism which is lurking right around the corner, if we don’t take care of our freedoms, the ad warns the reader.
On the draped podium the featured speaker for the Crusade rose to speak.
A trim, plain-spoken man with protruding, tobacco stained teeth, a regular yankee doodle dandy in a Panama hat and Hawaiian shirt, he methodically fired up a king sized Old Gold cigarette before he spoke, licked his dry, sun parched lips, and briskly smoothed down his army regulation brush cut hair.
“We must make the greatest possible contribution to the defense of our way of life, the American way of life. Freedom …can live only where there is access to the truth,” he began clearly and confidently.
“Communists,” he stated gravely, “teach that America is a vicious enemy of humanity.”
“This slander against our noble purposes, is one example of the campaign of hatred that is being waged against America and freedom around the globe,” he went on his anger clearly rising.”
“We face not only ruthless men but lies and misconceptions intended to rob us of our faith within and of our friends throughout the world. “
“Millions of people will hear no other version but a hissing, hating tirade against America!” he said clearly outraged. “We think it is incredible that such poison be swallowed!”
The crowd burst into spontaneous applause.
Vintage Ad to Support Radio Free Europe and their Truth Dollars Campaign 1951
“How do Truth Dollars fight Communism you ask? ” Anticipating the question on everyone’s mind, he answered.
Breaking into a lopsided grin he continued, “By exposing Red lies…revealing news suppressed by Moscow and by unmasking Communist collaborators. The broadcasts are by exiles in the native tongues of the people to whom they are beamed.”
Squinting against the bright afternoon sun that broke through the fog, the speaker mopped the sweat from his brow, took a long pull on an ice-cold Coke and searched for familiar faces.
“Radio Free Europe has pierced the iron curtain with truth, answers the lies of the Kremlin and brings messages of hope, but it needs your help. ……. This is your chance to play a personal part to resist Communist aggression…..”
“Children’s Crusade Against Communism” trading Cards, published by the Bowman Gum Company who also published baseball cards 1951
“Powerful Communist radio stations,” he said pointing his jaw at us contemptuously, “incessantly tell the world that we Americans are physically soft and mentally corrupt that we are disunited and confused that we are selfish and cowardly that we have nothing to offer the world but imperialism and exploitation.”
Mopping the copious sweat from his brow, he continued: “Weaving a fantastic pattern of lies and twisted facts they confound the listener into believing that we are war mongers and that the secret police and slave camps of Communism offer brighter hope for the future than do self-government and free enterprise…”
(l) Vintage Tide ad 1949 (R) Classic Cold War Comic Book 1947 “Is This Tomorrow? America under Communism” a 48 page cautionary tale of how EZ it would be for Communists to take over the US. It was published “”To make you more alert to the menace of Communism.”
As he spoke, volunteer crusaders were circulating around the crowd collecting donations.
A pretty, trim woman with curly strawberry blonde hair and fashionable Mamie Eisenhower bangs, her heart-shaped face aglow with dewy fresh dimples, approached us: “Give truth dollars and get in the fight,” she said with pure sugar-coated goodness.
Her creamy, Jergen’s- soft- hands gripped the “Truth Dollars” collection can tightly as her arm extended in Dads direction. “Every dollar buys 100 words of truth. That’s how hard ‘Truth Dollars’ work. Your dollar will help 70 million people resist the Kremlin!”
The collection cans were calculated to resemble the ubiquitous March of Dimes canisters, but instead of a heart breaking picture of little girls with steel braces on their legs, pictured was a map showing radio towers with zig zagging radio signals broadcasting across Europe into The Soviet Union.
And the containers wide opening was calculated to accommodate more than a thin dime. Apparently spreading the truth cost a lot more than curing polio.
“The poor people trapped behind the iron curtain know nothing except that which their government says they should know” the woman somberly explained to us.
Speaking directly to my brother and me the lady leaned in close.
Her snowy white Clorox clean clothes were as sweet and honest- to –goodness- fresh smelling as her minty fresh no-tell- tale mouth breath as she continued: “The communists are weaving fantastic stories and twisted facts about America, unlike in our country where our government tells us the truth.”
L) Vintage Book The Soviet Image of the United States A Study in Distortion by Frederick C. Barghoorn Co. 1950 Harcourt, Brace & Company
The book claims that “Soviet propaganda against the United States is one of the main instruments of the Kremlin’s aggressive foreign policy Moscow, building the worlds greatest war machine, is seeking to turn world opinion against the US by accusing America of crimes against humanity of which itself is guilty.”
Sidling up to us was another faithful crusader, a clean-cut, level eyed, forthright and fact- filled champion of truth who nodded in agreement, “Truth as clear and undistorted as the perfect picture you were promised on your new RCA television set”.
True picture, no blur no distortion that was the American way
The wind picked up and the fog slowly lifted as a cold front moved in. Dad placed a hand over his heart as he looked up towards the bunting draped American Legion Post.
With a gleam in his eye, he gently placed my own little hand over my heart.
I would promise to preserve and protect The American Way of Life taking an oath of loyalty to adhere to the directives from a contingent of Generals- General Mills, General Electric and five-star billion dollar grossing General Motors.
My own military industrial complex.
“Keep Your Fingers Crossed” Collage by Sally Edelstein
After finishing his hot dog, dad fished in his pocket for his wallet. Putting the crumpled bills in my little hand I deposited the money in the donation cans.
We would fight the big lie with the big truth
Of course the truth of Radio Free Europe being a CIA funded front was something we kept behind our own Made-in the USA curtains for over 20 years.
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The many voices of the late, great June Foray
June Foray’s memorable voice was the sound of my cold war childhood.
Not only was hers the voice I heard when I pulled the string on my Chatty Cathy doll, a childish sweet voice saying “Let’s play house” but she was also the pre-feminist melodramatic voice of that perennially distressed damsel Nell Fenwick the long-suffering girl friend of that Saturday morning TV staple Dudley Do Right, the lantern-jawed Canadian Mountie.
June Foray played both sides of the cold war in that classic cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle, voicing both Rocky and the “Russian” spy Natasha
Disney, Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera could all claim June’s distinctive voice in countless roles, but it was the high-pitched tone of Rocky the plucky flying squirrel with the broad smile, one half of that fearless duo out to save Western civilization, and the throaty Eastern European rasp of that sinister spy Natasha out to sabotage all things American, that were my favorites.
Without taking sides June Foray played both sides of the cold war in that classic cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle.
Rocky and Friends provided years of entertainment for boomer kids trying to shake the duck and cover reality of their lives. The shows constant barrage of cultural references spoke to the paranoia of mid-century Americans.
Hokey smoke, what would my cold war childhood be without Rocket J. Squirrel and his irascible companion Bullwinkle J. Moose rescuing the American Way of Life on a weekly basis from the clutches of the evil empire of Pottsylvania by defeating the wicked schemes of Mr. Big and his accomplices in crime that hapless duo of Slavic spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatalay.
For better or worse the cold war never seem to defrost in Rocky’s home town of Frost Bite Falls, Minnesota, providing years of entertainment for boomer kids trying to shake the duck and cover reality of their lives. Like MAD Magazine, Rocky and Bullwinkle with their irreverent satire, helped kids navigate through a pretty perilous world, as they entered the uncertainty of a new cold war decade, the 1960’s.
Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev vowed he would “bury us!”
The last year of the 1950’s was a chilly time for the cold war.
The arms race and the space race were going full throttle between the two Superpowers. Still stinging from Sputnik and trying to play catch up with the Russians, Americans were spooked when Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev boasted of Soviet military supremacy. At home Congressmen groused about the growing dangers of a gaping missile gap, including a young man with his eye on the presidency, the senator from Massachusetts John Kennedy.
In back yards from coast to coast Americans were busy building home fallout shelters after Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, commented that spring that: “it was necessary to provide every person in the U.S. with a shelter.”
There wasn’t much to laugh at.
The formula for “Rocky and His Friends” would rarely change even as the name of the show itself changed – Rocky the plucky squirrel teamed up with the dim-witted but good-hearted partner Bullwinkle, a duo of fearless adventurers who wandered the globe saving western civilization, stumbling into one absurd situation after another while battling”Russian” spies.
In the fall of 1959, against the backdrop of the cold war and the end of the Eisenhower years the cold war came to the cartoons in the form of “Rocky and His Friends.”
Set the Waybac Machine for Thursday, November 19, 1959.
It’s 5:30, mom’s meatloaf was tucked in the oven nearly ready for our 6pm dinner. With a half hour free before supper my brother and I were glued to the TV. We quickly turned the dial on our Admiral TV to ABC tuning in to the premier of a new animated show, “Rocky and His Friends,” the latest offering from animator Jay Ward.
Crusader Rabbit was televisions first cartoon character produced for the new medium airing in 1950
Like most kids, I had been a fan of Ward’s first creation “Crusader Rabbit,” which was the first ever animated cartoon created especially for television.
In the earliest days of TV, cartoons for the kiddies were purchased from motion picture overstock. Saturday matinée cartoons from my movie going parents’ generation would find a new home in TV audiences. Krazy Kat clawed her way to TV, Out of the Inkwell’s Koko the Clown invited laughter and a WWII Bugs Bunny hopped over to the new medium.
But with the appearance of Crusader Rabbit and his sidekick “Rags” the Tiger, TV cartoons were born.
First appearing in 1950 this do-good duo were a precursor to Rocky and Bullwinkle, embarking on adventures to exotic locale, stumbling into one absurd situation after another, always foiled by an evil character named Dudley Night Shade, an early incarnation of Snidley Whiplash. The show, composed of cliffhanger shorts that emulated early radio series, was a formula Rocky would continue.
By 1959 when ads for the debut of the flying squirrel who sported a pilots helmet and his dimwitted but brave moose sidekick appeared, two pawed, four-footed anthropomorphic cartoon creatures crusading for good was old hat to me.
Saturday morning TV villains had little chance whenever Hanna-Barbera’s spunky pooch Reddy and his feline partner Ruff were around. And Television already had a talking flying rodent named Mighty Mouse who was pretty good at saving the day. And he could sing to boot.
But Rocky and Bullwinkle offered something none of the others did. What made the show different was its sly and not so sly cultural references to the cold war.
That very first episode I watched entitled Jet Fuel Formula made clear its cold war allusions. The themes of the arms race, the space race, international technological competition, and espionage mirrored the cold war paranoia between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. perfectly. And five years before Dr Strangelove, Jet Fuel Formula was satirizing the American Military and government.
Suddenly the cold war was a barrel of laughs.
Like Boris, Natasha takes orders from the nation’s leader Fearless Leader and rarely seen Mr Big. Boris’s accomplice Natasha’s main catch phrase is referring everyone as “dollink” spoken with her thick Pottsylvania accent courtesy of June Foray. No helpless heroine, Natasha was clearly the smarter of the two constantly pointing out Boris’s flaws to his plans and expressing contempt for his bungling failures. Inevitably Boris would shout at her “SHARRUP YOU MOUTH” when his schemes failed.
Who wouldn’t laugh at those Soviet-stand ins Boris and Natasha, a couple of no good-niks. Fiendish, but always inept these two cold war spies from Eastern Europe were forever scheming to control the world, topple its economy and destroy the American Way of life.
It was like laughing at Khrushchev himself.
Fearless Leader was the dictator of Pottsylvania and employer of the inept spies and could be found in his underground hideout “Central Control.” But he did answer to one man, the small Mr. Big.
These were not the cartoon staple of villains decked out in top hats and capes with twirling handle bar mustaches but instead Slavic speaking buffoons.
Boris Badenov (Long on Bad) the pasty white, pencil mustached, black hatted villain and his seductive, comely side kick Natasha Fataly (Long for Fatal) were spies for the sinister fictional nation of Pottsylvania, a closed repressive nation populated entirely by spies, secret agents, and saboteurs. Ruled by Fearless Leader a man sporting a monocle and German cross with an improbable German accent, fed my fear of Nazis and Communists in one clean swoop.
Because Truth, Justice and the American Way always prevailed, the “Soviet’s” misdeeds were continually thwarted by Rocky and Bullwinkle. In the end Boris and Natasha always failed in their missions to bring America to its knees.
In Frost Bite Falls at least, we were winning the cold war.
And that my friends, is a true Fractured Fairy Tale!
© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
It was July 4, 1955. The cold war was frozen solid.
Never were American dreams more potent or more seductive than in Cold War America when the USA stood united and confident in our role as leader of the Free World.
It would soon be my first Independence Day and my parents believed it was time for its littlest citizen to be introduced to her Uncle Sam and “My America.”
What better place to be inculcated with truth, justice and the American way than at an honest to goodness Fourth of July parade.
Like most American children I would be inoculated with a strong dose of Americanism which if administered at an early age would build up your immunity to any opposing belief system.
That year, the theme of our local parade was the celebration of The Four Freedoms.
All across Long Island, residents were a buzz over the fact that our towns parade was being co-sponsored by those Cold War crusaders of truth from “The Crusade For Freedom”.
Vintage Ad Radio Free Europe Truth Dollar Campaign 1955
The Crusade, was a privately funded donation drive that raised “truth dollars” to support Radio Free Europe, the radio station that broadcast news and current affairs to the enslaved people behind the Iron Curtain.
In the black and white cold war world of us vs them, we were convinced that the Russians were hell-bent on destroying freedom and the American way of life and it would be up to us to contain them.
WWII Soviet Allies (L) Life Magazine cover 3/29/43 featuring warm and fuzzy Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin (R) Life magazine cover 2/12/45 featuring our brave ally a Soviet Soldier courageously driving on to Berlin
Like so many war born marriages it turned out our grand alliance during WWII with the Soviets was more a marriage of convenience and our relations had turned frosty.
As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet, the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazis had been seamlessly and swiftly rerouted to those Godless Russians Commies, uniting our country once again.
Uncle Sam was certain that the Communists were not only concealing the truth but were waging a campaign of hatred against us and our peaceful, decent motives.
They were weaving fantastic stories and twisted facts about America unlike in our country where the government told us the truth.
Truth as clear and undistorted as the perfect picture you were promised on your new Philco television set.
True picture, no blur, no distortion, that was the American Way.
(L) Vintage Book The Soviet Image of the United States A Study in Distortion by Frederick C. Barghoorn Co. 1950 Harcourt, Brace & Company
The book claims that “Soviet propaganda against the United States is one of the main instruments of the Kremlin’s aggressive foreign policy Moscow, building the worlds greatest war machine, is seeking to turn world opinion against the US by accusing America of crimes against humanity of which itself is guilty>”
By exposing the calculated lies that Communists were spreading, and promoting the American way of Life, Radio Free Europe became a vital strategy in winning the Cold War.
The Crusade For Freedom had aired public service announcements on the radio all week leading up to the parade, as well as advertisements in all the papers.
“Every hour, every day, millions hear no other version but hating America” Dad read aloud from a full-page ad in the NY Times, paid for by the Crusade and their Truth dollars. “The unfortunate people behind the iron curtain are fed a steady diet of lies and misstatements and the poor people are made to swallow that poison”.
Dad wanted us to realize how vital Radio Free Europe was.
As my brother mindlessly popped fistfuls of sugar crisps into his mouth -for breakfast its dandy, for snacks it’s so handy or eat like candy: Dad tried to explain :“Just as mom feeds us wholesome good food, we needed to feed the poor people behind the iron curtain the good nourishing truth”.
America was not only the greatest nation in the world it was the very embodiment of freedom, democracy and progress.
With my made- in- the- USA regulation rattle in one hand and my National Dairy Council issued bottle of milk in the other I was ready to to be inducted into Uncle Sam’s service and pledge my allegiance to the land of the Free.
70 years ago NATO was born in the aftermath of WWII out of a desire to prevent WWIII.
Conceived out of necessity, this enduring alliance was initially forged to prevent Soviet expansionism. The shared democratic values of its members formed a unique bond. An alliance meant to provide reliability in an unreliable world.
For 70 years Europeans have known that America’s foreign policy and priorities would be consistent with theirs.
Until now
DonaldTrump’s flip flops and broadsides against NATO have rattled this long and formidable military alliance that largely defined the global post-war order. His veiled threats to pull out plays right into Putin’s hands.
From its Cold War inception, Russia has bristled at the formation of NATO, wanting nothing less than a dissolution of the organization. The North Atlantic Treaty was at heart a military alliance intended as a defense against the Russians.
It is likely Trump has never bothered to understand why the partnership was formed in the first place.
All roads lead to Russia.
The Hungry Bear
The fear of Soviet aggression and the spread of communism defined the post-WWII world.
Cast as the Evil Empire during the cold war, an expansionist Russia was viewed as a “hungry bear” whose insatiable appetite needed to be controlled. The media was flooded with maps depicting the Soviet Unions aggressive tendencies appearing ominously, splotched in red, depicting the global pattern of the spread of the Red offensive
Convinced that comrades in the Kremlin were busy spinning a web of control, hell-bent on forcibly enslaving free people everywhere, the U.S. and her western European allies needed to contain the cunning Russian bear.
Or a cold war could turn very hot.
Bear Hug
WWII Soviet Allies (L) Life Magazine cover 3/29/43 featuring warm and fuzzy Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin (R) Life magazine cover 2/12/45 featuring our brave ally a Soviet Soldier courageously driving on to Berlin
The big chill almost made us forget that only a few years earlier this big brutal Russian bear had been our warm and fuzzy teddy bear of a wartime ally
During WWII, no one could hold a candle to those brave Stalingrad sacrificing red white and blue Russians. Led by twinkly-eyed pipe smoking “Uncle Joe Stalin they were our comrades in fighting the Nazis.
Songwriters cheered and praised our Soviet comrades as we whistled “You Can’t Brush Off a Russian” and “Stalin Wasn’t Stall’in.” Selling the Soviets to us like a bottle of Pepsi, one ditty went:
“The Soviet Union hits the spot
12 million soldiers that’s a lot
Timashen and Stalin too
The Soviet Union is Red white and blue.”
As the war came to a close the Soviets and Americans converged in Berlin, toasting each other at their shared victory.
The guns fell silent in Europe in May 1945 but the post-WWII world would have very little peace. A hot war might have ended with those 2 fiery Atomic Blasts in Japan but another war a cold one began with our former allies in arms, the Russians.
By 1946 the world was changing at a dizzying pace.
Maps had been redrawn, swelling and shrinking the areas of countries creating new boundaries, as cards were re-shuffled and friendships dissolved. Like so many war born marriages, it turned out our grand alliance with the Soviets was more a marriage of convenience. Uncle Joe, our warm and fuzzy teddy bear quickly turned into a cold-blooded grizzly bear ready to gobble up crippled Europe turning its starving shivering population into godless Communists. As Soviet tanks angrily roamed Eastern European streets, Churchill warned of an Iron Curtain descending over Europe.
Our war born goodwill faded as quickly as Elizabeth Arden’s vanishing cream.
Convinced the Russians had embarked on an aggressive campaign to destroy our government, establishing the American Way of Life as ideal became even more crucial during this time contrasting it to the “Ruthless, Godless Communist” way of repression. We were to be on alert to the menace of Communism.
As the cold war was heating up a series of events in the late 1940’s pointed to the fact that the security of Western Europe was tied to the security of the U.S. The threat of Soviet invasion of Western Europe pushing further into the freedom-loving democracies hung over the continent.
As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazis had been and swiftly rerouted to those Godless Russian commies.
Germany, in fact, was a constant cause of concern.
After the war, Germany had been carved up into 4 occupied zones between the Allied victors of WWII. Berlin itself was divided up into Communist East Berlin and democratic West Berlin. But Berlin was stuck deep inside the Soviet-occupied parts of East Germany. West Berlin was a thriving, cosmopolitan city. In Soviet East Berlin the destruction of the war was still visible, the people far from prosperous, with luxury items scarce. Every year tens of thousands of East Berliners fled to capitalist West Germany.
The fear was that the Soviets wanted Germany to be the communist centerpiece of Europe. With Germany a Soviet satellite, Stalin licked his chops with the thought of Western Europe falling under the domination of the USSR. In June 1948 the Soviets imposed a blockade of Berlin in hopes of starving the Western Allies out of Berlin.
The same year the Soviets launched a coup in Czechoslovakia overthrowing a democratic government. They had already placed a communist government in power in Poland and extended its sway to every Eastern European country it occupied since 1945.
Adding fuel to the fire, America’s nuclear monopoly came to an abrupt end in 1949.
We were just digesting the Communist take over of China when on a hot summer morning in August the Soviets detonated an Atom Bomb sending a shock wave around the world. Many feared an impending war with Russia. As long as the aggression existed in the form of the Evil Empire and “their unrelenting drive to enslave humanity” the threat of an unwanted nuclear war would cast a long shadow.
The clear Soviet provocations created the urgency for the collective defense of Western Europe.
This was the grave backdrop as talks proceeded on a North Atlantic Treaty.
Europe was still clawing its way out of the destruction of the war and to be credible, any collective defense had to include the U.S. and Canada. After the war much of the world was economically shattered, returning home to cities that were often just rubble of broken bricks and smoldering wood, the desolate shell of a former city not yet done burning.
In our country, our economy was booming and there wasn’t a single building demolished by bombs, a brick displaced, or window broken and the only geographical scar was the one we ourselves had made on the empty deserts of New Mexico.
America had come out of the war as the only major industrial power not severely damaged, the richest country on earth.
President Harry Truman signing the North Atlantic Treaty which marked the beginning of NATO in a special signing ceremony on Aug. 24, 1949
European leaders met with U.S. defense, military and diplomates at the Pentagon exploring a framework for a new and unprecedented alliance.
All members agreed to defend one another – that is still the core of the alliance. It was a security pact stating that a military attack against one would be considered an attack against them all. NATO was both a military alliance and also ideological. These were all liberal democracies and the will to push back against totalitarianism and Communism ran deep.
The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by twelve nations on a Monday afternoon in April of 1949 in Washington D.C., saw the United States accept the lead in the free world’s postwar resistance to Communist aggression and subversion.
We accepted our banner as leaders of the Free World with pride and purpose and commitment
Today
Today NATO is the strongest, most successful alliance in history
But it has never been just a purely military alliance. There is a special emotional bond between America and the European allies. It is a political alliance as well based on the common aspirations of its members of freedom and peace. As the NATO treaty states its members are determined to safeguard individual freedom and rule of law. These values are far from obsolete
But these principles are under assault today. Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, the terrorism of the Islamic State spreading from the Middle East to the capitals of Europe, authoritarian regimes developing nuclear weapons — as different as these challenges are, they have one thread in common: They come from those who oppose the international order. They try to undermine or even change the rules that have governed the age of democracy and prosperity since World War II.
The democracies of NATO need to stand together to overcome these challenges.
Copyright (©) 2019 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
When Donald Trump encourages Russia to attack our NATO Allies there should be more than a red flag. When it comes to danger as well as derangement we are at Def Con 1.
Is anyone surprised that Trump has no sense of history? A man who warns that Joe Biden will lead us into WWII certainly has no sense of the state of the world post-1945
75 years ago NATO was born in the aftermath of WWII out of a desire to prevent WWIII.
Conceived out of necessity, this enduring alliance was initially forged to prevent Soviet expansionism. The shared democratic values of its members formed a unique bond. An alliance meant to provide reliability in an unreliable world.
For three-quarters of a century, Europeans have known that America’s foreign policy and priorities would be consistent with theirs.
Until now.
As president, Donald Trump’s broadsides against NATO rattled this long and formidable military alliance that largely defined the global post-war order. His veiled threats to pull out play right into Putin’s hands. Now his latest threats have caused international outrage.
From its Cold War inception, Russia has bristled at the formation of NATO, wanting nothing less than a dissolution of the organization. The North Atlantic Treaty was at heart a military alliance intended as a defense against the Russians.
It is likely Trump has never bothered to understand why the partnership was formed in the first place.
In case he never understood it, all roads lead to Russia.
The fear of Soviet aggression and the spread of communism defined the post-WWII world.
Cast as the Evil Empire during the Cold War, an expansionist Russia was viewed as a “hungry bear” whose insatiable appetite needed to be controlled. The media was flooded with maps depicting the Soviet Union’s aggressive tendencies appearing ominously, splotched in red, depicting the global pattern of the spread of the Red offensive
Convinced that comrades in the Kremlin were busy spinning a web of control, hell-bent on forcibly enslaving free people everywhere, the U.S. and her Western European allies needed to contain the cunning Russian bear.
Or a cold war could turn very hot.
Bear Hug
WWII Soviet Allies (L) Life Magazine cover 3/29/43 featuring warm and fuzzy Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin (R) Life magazine cover 2/12/45 featuring our brave ally a Soviet Soldier courageously driving on to Berlin
The big chill almost made us forget that only a few years earlier this big brutal Russian bear had been our warm and fuzzy teddy bear of a wartime ally
During WWII, no one could hold a candle to those brave Stalingrad sacrificing red white, and blue Russians. Led by twinkly-eyed pipe smoking “Uncle Joe Stalin they were our comrades in fighting the Nazis.
Songwriters cheered and praised our Soviet comrades as we whistled “You Can’t Brush Off a Russian” and “Stalin Wasn’t Stall’in.” Selling the Soviets to us like a bottle of Pepsi, one ditty went:
“The Soviet Union hits the spot
12 million soldiers that’s a lot
Timashen and Stalin too
The Soviet Union is Red white and blue.”
As the war came to a close the Soviets and Americans converged in Berlin, toasting each other at their shared victory.
The guns fell silent in Europe in May 1945 but the post-WWII world would have very little peace. A hot war might have ended with those 2 fiery Atomic Blasts in Japan but another war a cold one began with our former allies in arms, the Russians.
By 1946 the world was changing at a dizzying pace.
Maps had been redrawn, swelling and shrinking the areas of countries creating new boundaries, as cards were re-shuffled and friendships dissolved. Like so many war-born marriages, it turned out our grand alliance with the Soviets was more a marriage of convenience. Uncle Joe, our warm and fuzzy teddy bear quickly turned into a cold-blooded grizzly bear ready to gobble up crippled Europe turning its starving shivering population into godless Communists. As Soviet tanks angrily roamed Eastern European streets, Churchill warned of an Iron Curtain descending over Europe.
Our war-born goodwill faded as quickly as Elizabeth Arden’s vanishing cream.
Convinced the Russians had embarked on an aggressive campaign to destroy our government, establishing the American Way of Life as an ideal became even more crucial during this time contrasting it to the “Ruthless, Godless Communist” way of repression. We were to be on alert to the menace of Communism.
As the Cold War was heating up a series of events in the late 1940’s pointed to the fact that the security of Western Europe was tied to the security of the U.S. The threat of Soviet invasion of Western Europe pushing further into the freedom-loving democracies hung over the continent.
As if shifting gears between enemy and ally was as effortless as the automatic transmission in your Chevrolet the considerable fury and fear that had fueled our hatred of those bloodless Nazis had been and swiftly rerouted to those Godless Russian commies.
Germany, in fact, was a constant cause of concern.
After the war, Germany had been carved up into 4 occupied zones between the Allied victors of WWII. Berlin itself was divided up into Communist East Berlin and democratic West Berlin. But Berlin was stuck deep inside the Soviet-occupied parts of East Germany. West Berlin was a thriving, cosmopolitan city. In Soviet East Berlin the destruction of the war was still visible, the people far from prosperous, with luxury items scarce. Every year tens of thousands of East Berliners fled to capitalist West Germany.
The fear was that the Soviets wanted Germany to be the communist centerpiece of Europe. With Germany a Soviet satellite, Stalin licked his chops with the thought of Western Europe falling under the domination of the USSR. In June 1948 the Soviets imposed a blockade of Berlin in hopes of starving the Western Allies out of Berlin.
The same year the Soviets launched a coup in Czechoslovakia overthrowing a democratic government. They had already placed a communist government in power in Poland and extended its sway to every Eastern European country it occupied since 1945.
Adding fuel to the fire, America’s nuclear monopoly came to an abrupt end in 1949.
We were just digesting the Communist takeover of China when on a hot summer morning in August the Soviets detonated an atomic bomb sending a shock wave around the world. Many feared an impending war with Russia. As long as the aggression existed in the form of the Evil Empire and “their unrelenting drive to enslave humanity” the threat of an unwanted nuclear war would cast a long shadow.
The clear Soviet provocations created the urgency for the collective defense of Western Europe.
This was the grave backdrop as talks proceeded on a North Atlantic Treaty.
Europe was still clawing its way out of the destruction of the war and to be credible, any collective defense had to include the U.S. and Canada. After the war much of the world was economically shattered, returning home to cities that were often just rubble of broken bricks and smoldering wood, the desolate shell of a former city not yet done burning.
In our country, our economy was booming and there wasn’t a single building demolished by bombs, a brick displaced, or a window broken, and the only geographical scar was the one we ourselves had made on the empty deserts of New Mexico.
America had come out of the war as the only major industrial power not severely damaged, the richest country on earth.
President Harry Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty which marked the beginning of NATO in a special signing ceremony on Aug. 24, 1949
European leaders met with U.S. defense, military, and diplomats at the Pentagon exploring a framework for a new and unprecedented alliance.
All members agreed to defend one another – that is still the core of the alliance. It was a security pact stating that a military attack against one would be considered an attack against them all. NATO was both a military alliance and also ideological. These were all liberal democracies and the will to push back against totalitarianism and Communism ran deep.
The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by twelve nations on a Monday afternoon in April of 1949 in Washington D.C., saw the United States accept the lead in the free world’s postwar resistance to Communist aggression and subversion.
We accepted our banner as leaders of the Free World with pride purpose and commitment
Today
Today NATO is the strongest, most successful alliance in history
But it has never been just a purely military alliance. There is a special emotional bond between America and the European allies. It is a political alliance as well based on the common aspirations of its members of freedom and peace. As the NATO treaty states its members are determined to safeguard individual freedom and the rule of law.
These values are far from obsolete
Copyright (©) 2024 Sally Edelstein All Rights Reserved
