Culture Of The Cold War example essay topic

384 words
After World War II had ended, rising tensions between the United States of America and the Soviet Union came to be. They arose because of a difference in the view each side had on the world after the Second World War. The popular culture of the United States changed greatly during this time, for it was the time of the Cold War. It played a direct affect on the culture of the country, changing movies, books and other forms of entertainment. The culture of the Cold War also brought a new specter that haunted America, the specter of Communism. Just a century earlier, the fear of Communism, or the Red Scare, had traveled through Europe and now it had made its way into the United States by introducing ideological politics.

Because of this, American culture was changed throughout the 1940's and the 1950's. The investigation of Hollywood radicals by the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947 and 1951 was a continuation of pressures first exerted in the late 1930's and early 1940's by the Dies Committee and State Senator Jack Tenney's California Joint Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities. HUAC charged that Communists had established a significant base in the dominant medium of mass culture. Communists were said to be placing subversive messages into Hollywood films and discriminating against unsympathetic colleagues. A further concern was that Communists were in a position to place negative images of the United States in films that would have wide international distribution. A major part of popular culture back in the 1940's and 1950's, as well as today, was the movie industry.

A lot pf pressure was put on producers to keep such topics as the Red Scare out of movies. If this was so, then why was Jack Warner allowed to make a movie that combined an all out assault on American isolationists with a complete acceptance with the Stalinist account of the Purges? Well, according to Warner, he "considered his film to be a patriotic service to the New Deal in the war against fascism" (Dan Georgakas, p. 1). He also had the support from the Roosevelt administration as proof that this was in fact a service to the New Deal.