American Popular Culture and the Cold War

Mark A. Landis

Writing Assignment #5 Final

How did depictions of the Cold War change over time in the American Popular Culture and what did those changes, in your view, reflect about the feelings of the American public?

The Cold War Revisited

The Cold War crossed multiple lines of generation; spanning decades of cultural change in America. In many instances, the Cold War was the impetus of a good deal of those changes, however it also was subject to other points of societal evolution. The changing depiction of the Cold War can best be served by reviewing several of the means by which the war itself was viewed, as those perceptions are the basis of the feelings of the American public.

Nine months after his failed bid for reelection as Prime Minister of England Winston Churchill made his now famous Iron Curtain speech officially titled the “Sinews of Peace” where he declared that. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. While the Soviets had already been busily “liberating” several Eastern European countries into their control the Iron Curtain speech was the first time the Soviet policy of expansionism had been given a name.

While the countries in Western Europe were implicitly opposed to Soviet Control, none were in a position to resist either economically, militarily or by the loss of so many of the young men capable of the work needed to rebuild. The ashes of war, and the devastation of the infrastructure of many of the cities, and nearly all of the countries of...