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This chapter examines the constitutive role of nineteenth and early twentieth-century anti-Catholic polemics in shaping anti-Communist rhetoric during the early Cold War. It charts how crucial anti-Catholic tropes, according to which Catholicism denied free will, perpetuated psychological and spiritual enslavement, and perverted follower’s emotional lives, resurfaced as an anti-Communist tropes in 1940s and 1950s. Anti-communist writers, both consciously and unconsciously, drew on these anti-Catholic tropes to declare that Communism denied free thought through brainwashing, expectations of total obedience, and spiritual enslavement. These conceptual and rhetorical continuities, we argue, help explain why many thinkers conceived Communism as a threat not only to economic or political orders, but also to the psychological and emotional foundations of civilization itself.

Chapter Four discusses identifying the core Nazi membership and building biographies of the leading figures. The narrative continues with partial coordination of Oberammergau’s community council. As party members introduced a specifically Nazi culture and Catholics maintained their public presence, new joiners flocked to the Nazi party. The chapter turns to the motives for joining revealed through the biographies of top Nazis, both Catholics and Protestants, beginning with the Nazi mayor and including his nemesis within the party, the Motorstorm commander. Two Nazi generations, war-scarred veterans and unemployed youth, made up the core members for whom both anti-Communism and anti-Semitism emerge in the biographies as driving factors. The Nazi leaders introduced in Chapter Four become the characters carrying the narrative of Oberammergau’s Nazi regime in the following chapters. That story resumes with the first Nazi May Day celebrations in Oberammergau and a confrontation over the Corpus Christi procession.

This chapter focuses on the theories of Karl Loewenstein. In the 1950s, German liberal politicians, intellectuals, and jurists welcomed the theory of militant democracy and claimed that political rights were dependent on loyalty to democratic institutions. They became ardent advocates of limiting rights and energetically supported Germany's participation in Cold War anti-Communist suppression. The transformation of German liberalism and the rise of militant democracy drew from older experiences. They were deeply shaped by the resurrection of a Weimar-era theory promulgated by Loewenstein, the liberal émigré who coined the term “militant democracy.” After the war, Loewenstein resumed his campaign to build a militant democracy in Germany, with the backing of U.S. occupation authorities. American officials, who believed that his plan would promote democratization and strengthen anti-Communist sentiments, sponsored his writings, lectures, and speeches.

This chapter talks about how the ethnic Chinese throughout the United States greeted the news of the People's Republic of China's entry into the Korean War with immense trepidation. Almost overnight, the prevailing images of Chinese in the American public eye had metamorphosed from friendly Pacific allies to formidable, threatening foes. Chinatown's Korean War Red Scare dramatized the ways in which the Cold War structured the reconfiguration of Chinese American citizenship in the post-Exclusion era. The ascendance of anti-Communism as the defining paradigm of US foreign policy after World War II introduced new imperatives to clarify Chinese America's social and political standing. To address these issues, both parties looked to the identification of Chinese in the United States as Overseas Chinese—that is, members of a global Chinese diaspora with ties to each other and China.

This chapter examines some aspects of the relationship between France and Germany in the inter-war years, and discusses French responses to the German problem. What came to be called ‘collaboration’ had a long prehistory, and this complicated responses to defeat in 1940.

This chapter discusses the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935, which fanned the flames of anti-Communism while simultaneously creating opportunities for Communists in the labor movement. In Birmingham, the CIO was more than just a federation of labor organizations. The CIO offered activists strength in numbers, security, interracial unity, and legitimacy—goals that Alabama Communists had hoped to achieve through the Popular Front. Thus, it should not be surprising that black Communists devoted more time and energy to the CIO, contributing to the decline of the Party. Most Blacks who left the Party during the Popular Front were not disillusioned with the goals or ideals of the movement; they simply found a better vehicle through which to realize these goals. For some black working people, the CIO was the first real alternative to the Communist Party; for others, the CIO became the Party.

This chapter argues that struggles over idealized visions of marriage, children, and the family were key to competing notions of the nation’s future in this period. The chapter demonstrates that, during the revolution’s first year in power, the leadership embarked on moderate reforms to bolster the family, unveiling initiatives to increase formal rates of marriage, construct mass housing, foment popular family tourism, and supply day care for working mothers. But as the revolution radicalized, new political mobilizations such as the 1961 literacy campaign increasingly took women, adolescents, and children out of the family home, and broader societal conflicts over religion and education grew increasingly sharp. In this context, the growing anti-Communist movement appealed to the “destruction of the family,” intentionally spreading rumors that parental custodial rights would be abrogated. Meanwhile, revolutionary leaders sharpened their visions of how the state might remold the working-class family.

Despite being minnows on the world stage, Thailand and the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia embraced sport during the Cold War as a means of nation and region building. This essay examines the political dimensions of the South East Asia Peninsular Games—the precursor of today’s Southeast Asian Games—founded in 1959 by US ally Thailand. This event reflected and reinforced the Cold War culture of Thailand and Southeast Asia. The games embodied motifs of regional friendship and antagonism between the “free” anti-Communist and neutralist nations of peninsular Southeast Asia; domestically, they embodied key themes in the domestic Cold War culture of Thailand, including nationalism, developmentalism, the revival of the monarchy, and militarization. This essay examines the Thai military junta’s objectives in founding the event, the effectiveness of the inaugural South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games, and the cultural and semiotic features that reinforced the games’ major themes.

This chapter examines the 1959 purge of homosexual professors at the University of Florida and its aftershocks, and the changing approach by the Johns Committee toward civil rights activists following the wave of sit-ins in 1960.

This chapter discusses how the period between 1954 and 1987 had come to represent the first phase of the movement to find truth and restore justice. After a series of coups and regime changes occurred, a brief moment of democratization came around in 1979—the Seoul Spring. However, another anti-Communist regime came to power, following the successful coup led by General Chun Doo-hwan. Throughout these years, the victims' calls for truth and justice had been systematically suppressed. At the same time, the general public accepted the government's official narrative, perceiving the Jeju 4.3 events as a Communist rebellion and the victims as Communists and their supporters. Nevertheless, it was impossible for the government to cover up all traces of the atrocities. Pursuing the ideals of truth and justice, university students, journalists, and writers were particularly significant in the early advocacy process.

This chapter discusses Plath's political views and her expression of these views in her fiction. After a discussion of the development of her political thought, the chapter examines Plath's conflicted representations of race in ‘The Perfect Setup’ and The Bell Jar. Her representations of the Cold War are considered next, from the story ‘Brief Encounter’ to the role of the Rosenbergs, the UN and Esther's romantic encounter with the Russian interpreter Constantin in The Bell Jar. In the novel, as in her diaries and in her Cold War collage of 1960, Plath sees American militarism and anti-Communism as against the interests of women, children and families. The chapter concludes with an examination of Plath's short stories on the racism experienced by German-Americans like her own family in the Second World War.

This chapter focuses on the prolonged and violent strikes that shook Warner Brothers in 1945 and 1946, and the consequent right-wing backlash within the industry (and beyond). The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had investigated Communism in Hollywood as early as 1940, and the union struggles throughout the 1930s had left indelible traces within the ranks of those opposed to unionisation within the film industry. If the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was the explicitly right-wing manifestation of anti-Communism in Hollywood, its creation in early 1944 was not a purely local phenomenon but a sign of the times. The reaction of Hollywood liberals to its creation was in keeping with the anti-fascist alliance of the war years.

In 1972, there appeared a film which failed lamentably at the box office in the United States precisely because it sums up so cogently the climate of the early 1970s and so brilliantly links that climate to the period under discussion in this book: Billy Wilder's Avanti!. Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 was a suitably ignominious ending to the most disreputable career in post-war American politics, one of Red-baiting, witch hunting, political chicanery and war crimes in Vietnam and Cambodia. It was a fitting ending to a politician who had gained power by claiming to find Red conspiracies everywhere. This is, however, a cautionary tale. Just as we have seen how the anti-Communism of liberals led to the suppression of the very laws concerning freedom of speech and thought they claimed to champion, so the refusal of liberals to oppose witch hunting led straight to the Vietnam war and opened the doors of the White House to Nixon. Ultimately, this was due to the attitude of liberals to Joseph McCarthy.

During the early Cold War, the Arnautoffs attracted more FBI surveillance. Victor was designated as DETCOM (Communist to be detained in case of national emergency) and COMSAB (potential Communist saboteur). With the rise of abstract expressionism, Victor’s social realism became marginalized, but he found a new cultural home in the California Labor School. He strongly defended the work of Anton Refregier at San Francisco’s Rincon Annex postoffice when it came under attack from anti-Communists. The Arnautoffs continued to be active in the Communist party and applied again to emigrate to the Soviet Union but were again denied

This chapter provides some context on the city of Detroit, New Deal labor, and the Communist Party. In the 1940s, Detroit was a boomtown confronted with enormous social and political change. Most Detroit residents had lived there for no more than a generation. The city's political and economic elites struggled to control these newcomers while the migrants themselves fought to assert their rights, which often conflicted with the rights of others. As a result of the growth of both its population and its labor movement, Detroit, a formerly largely white, open-shop town, became the most heavily unionized city in the nation with one of the largest African American populations outside of the South. Many of the same factors that led to Detroit's population changes also led to the expansion of the city's Communist Party.

This chapter focuses on political passing, in which the specter of passing was utilized in Hollywood films produced in the context of the Cold War. Films about political passing called into question who was who and the nature of identity. The notion that somebody could pass politically mirrored fears about racial passing, complicated by postwar obsessions with Communism. The chapter examines how anti-Communist films such as My Son John and Woman on Pier 13 tackle the “enemy within” and portray Communists as caricatures, either gangster-like or hyperintellectual, thus making visible what was supposed to be an invisible threat. It also considers the way anti-Communism in Hollywood exploited anxieties that were linked to postwar ideas about identity.