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The Origin of the Cold War Francis O'halloran University of Portland Northwest Passages Volume 1 | Issue 1 Article 6 April 2014 The irB th of Postwar Americanism: The Origin of the Cold War Francis O'Halloran University of Portland Follow this and additional works at: http://pilotscholars.up.edu/nwpassages Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation O'Halloran, Francis (2014) "The irB th of Postwar Americanism: The Origin of the Cold War," Northwest Passages: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 6. Available at: http://pilotscholars.up.edu/nwpassages/vol1/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History at Pilot Scholars. It has been accepted for inclusion in Northwest Passages by an authorized administrator of Pilot Scholars. For more information, please contact [email protected]. O'Halloran: The Birth of Postwar Americanism: The Origin of the Cold War NORTHWEST PASSAGES THE BIRTH OF POSTWAR AMERICANISM: THE ORIGIN OF THE COLD WAR n BY JOHN FRANCIS O’HALLORAN n West Potomac Park, Washington, D.C., three solitary, lonely stat- Iues of American and South Korean soldiers stand in eternal vigi- lance. There’s an inscription beneath them, in both Korean and English, displaying the park’s theme as “The Forgotten War.” On a nearby wall, underneath the known lists of men and women who fought and died during the Korean conflict, a placard reads, “Free- dom is not Free.” Just over the wall and down the park’s carefully kept pathways, a cluster of marble-white soldiers stand forever frozen in a replicated environment of the Korean War that pillaged the Korean peninsula with the blood of Koreans and Americans in 1950. One last bronze-casted plaque summates the entire thematic enterprise of the Korean War, glorifying the American “Sons and Daughters/ Who Answered the Call/ to Defend a Country/ They Never Knew/ and A People They Never Met.”1 In an attempt to restore significance to an apparently forgotten war, the Korean Memorial Park symbolizes two contradictory, yet quintessential effects of the Korean War. While ‘Forgotten’ by the cur- rent historiography of the Cold War, the Korean War solidified the twentieth-century role of an international, militarized America. From the post-World War II period to nearly the end of the twentieth- century, a foreign policy of exceptionalism began to manifest itself in various justified military and economic interventions. A common trope of this justification originated from a vilified depiction of Com- munism. The preoccupation with Communism first began with the United States’ government in the post-World War II period. The gov- ernment foresaw the threat that Communism posed to United States’ international interests and began to fret over the implications of a Published by Pilot Scholars, 2014 140 1 Northwest Passages, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 [2014], Art. 6 THE BIRTH OF POSTWAR AMERICANISM powerful and global Communist presence. Yet, in post-World War II America, the general public did not prioritize the international scene as a direct and existential threat to American domestic interests. The threat Communism posed to the legitimacy of the United States’ democratic free market society only became synonymous with both the general public and government at the physical manifestation of the North Korean invasion of the United States’ trusteeship of South Korea in 1950. In the historiographical tradition of Cold War America, near unan- imous consensus stated that the American experiences of the Cold War had severe implications on the domestic rhetoric throughout the twentieth-century.2 Yet, there has been little unanimity regarding the specificity of the advent of the Cold War as an American experi- ence: what this means is that no one can say for certain when the Cold War began.3 Before propositioning this paper’s theory, it is im- portant to understand how the history of the Cold War has so far been comprehended because this paper directly engages with the Cold War’s historiographical tradition. John Fousek, a historian who specializes in American foreign pol- icy during the twentieth-century, claims the Cold War’s aggression resulted from the acclaimed moral American victory of World War II.4 By fighting a ‘good war’ against the evil Nazi Germans, the Ameri- can postwar mindset began to promote ethical justifications for inter- national interventionism in the name of morality and ‘just war.’ Fousek argues that, over the course of the Cold War, the public con- tinually referenced the victorious sentiments of World War II and, in doing so, spread an ideology legitimizing the need for American in- terventionism during the Cold War for the ‘good’ of the world. There- fore, Fousek argues that the Cold War never truly began; rather, World War II’s recognition of the justified morality of the American acts of war continued to manifest throughout the Cold War, only with a different enemy. Properly understanding the Cold War and Korean http://pilotscholars.up.edu/nwpassages/vol1/iss1/6 141 2 O'Halloran: The Birth of Postwar Americanism: The Origin of the Cold War NORTHWEST PASSAGES War within the ideological inertia generated from two previously rhetorically justified World Wars demonstrates how the larger public discourse so easily acclimatized to the Cold War’s call for a moral America that had a responsibility to the international arena. In contrast to Fousek, John Gaddis, a preeminent military histori- an at Yale University, suggests in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 the Cold War really began in 1945 at the Pots- dam Conference.5 Conducted at what seemed to be the sure downfall of the German threat, the purpose of the Conference was to settle on an agenda for the administrations of the postwar territories of the Axis powers. Gaddis argues that the personalities of Truman, Churchill (Atlee after 1945), and Stalin so thoroughly clashed in the war of wills at the Conference that the inevitable byproduct resulted in a global petrified stalemate known as the Cold War.6 Therefore, the Cold War became inevitable and institutionalized at the 1945 Pots- dam Conference. In 2005, Gaddis, responding to postmodern criti- cism, wrote Cold War: A New History, in which he recognizes the importance of the continued domestic legitimatization of the Ameri- can role in the Cold War.7 Without the public’s legitimatization of the Cold War, Gaddis argues, the interrelationship between America on the international stage, and the international Cold War on the Ameri- can public discourse would not be as severe as historically suggested. Regardless, the Cold War, Gaddis concludes, as a conceptual advent of the world divided between the democracies and Communist states began at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. The public later in- fused the resulting government’s preoccupation with the interna- tional threat of Communism. These historiographical interpretations offer a foundation to promulgate this paper’s argument. Fousek’s recognition that the le- gitimization of the Cold War and the American role within it rose out of the American public discourse directly contradicts Gaddis’ insis- tence on the centrality of the role of the government propagating a Published by Pilot Scholars, 2014 142 3 Northwest Passages, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 [2014], Art. 6 THE BIRTH OF POSTWAR AMERICANISM national attitude of anti-Communism.8 However, both overlook a critical piece of the post-World War II era that complicates their argu- ments. That is to say, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the American public, in general, had no interest in continuing to par- ticipate on the international arena. The Cold War, therefore, could not be said to have begun in 1945, as Gaddis argues, because the American public had not yet conceptualized the idea of a Cold War and an American role within it. Rather, it took a series of domestic events, such as the dramatized and publicized trials of Senator Mc- Carthy and the Supreme Court convictions of US citizens as commu- nists, in 1949 that culminated in the advent of the Korean War in 1950 to formulate and instill a conceptualization of the Cold War within the American discourse. Beginning in the 1940s, the American economy experienced an upswing that left the people basking in the comforts of their new- found material wealth and industrial capabilities.9 At the barest of glimpses of Census data, it is easy to see how America had become inoculated against any serious preoccupation with foreign affairs.10 Wages increased triple-fold, with a 178% increase in consumer ex- penditures, accompanied by a 151.9% increase of the average house- hold’s income as compared to post-World War I.11 Average family expenditures increased 120.1% in the new economic prosperity. Food, clothing and housing accounted for 68.4% of total spending, a decrease from 1934-1940, signifying the mass profusion of consumer products in the economy.12 Not only did the dollar have a greater value, but also the accessibility to consumer goods became seeming- ly ubiquitous throughout the American culture. To top it all off, there had been a 10% increase in the population, with a 58% rise in new- borns as compared to the 1935-1940 period.13 The experience of wealth and new opportunities, while generally limited to the enjoy- ment of an exclusive proportion of the population, generated a post- World War II social attitude of narcissistic optimism. The American http://pilotscholars.up.edu/nwpassages/vol1/iss1/6 143 4 O'Halloran: The Birth of Postwar Americanism: The Origin of the Cold War NORTHWEST PASSAGES people became absolutely captivated by the possibility of the fulfill- ment of their various consumerist aspirations.14 In their search for the manifestation of their sacrifices during the War, the public re- garded external affairs as secondary, if at all.
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