Part A: The Cold War Where Historians Disagree - Origins of the Cold War
No issue in recent American history has produced more controversy than that of the origins of the Cold War, between the United States and the Soviet Union. Historians have disagreed, often sharply, over the question of who was responsible for the breakdown of American-Soviet relations, and on whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable or could have been avoided. The Cold War may now be over, but the debate over its origins is not.
For more than a decade after the end of World War II, few historians in the United States saw any reason to challenge the official American interpretation of the beginnings of the Cold War. Thomas A. Bailey spoke for most students of the conflict when he argued, in America Faces Russia (1950), that the breakdown of relations was a direct result of aggressive Soviet policies of expansion in the immediate postwar years. Stalin's government violated its solemn promises in the Yalta accords, imposed Soviet-dominated governments on the unwilling nations of Eastern Europe, and schemed to spread communism throughout the world. American policy was the logical and necessary response.
The American involvement in Vietnam disillusioned many historians with the premises of the containment policy and, thus, with the traditional view of the origins of the Cold War.
But even before the conflict in Asia had reached major proportions, the first works in what would become known as the "revisionist" interpretation began to appear. William Appleman Williams challenged the accepted wisdom in 1959 in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. The United States had operated in world affairs, Williams argued, in response to one overriding concern: its commitment to maintaining an "open door" for American trade in world markets. The confrontation with the Soviet Union, therefore, was less a response to Russian aggressive designs than an expression of the American belief in the necessity of capitalist expansion.
Later revisionists modified many of Williams's claims, but most accepted some of the basic outlines of his thesis: that the United States had been primarily to blame for the Cold War; that the Soviet Union had displayed no aggressive designs toward the West (and was too weak and exhausted at the end of World War II to be able to pose a serious threat to America in any case); that the United States had used its nuclear monopoly to attempt to threaten and intimidate Stalin; that Harry Truman had recklessly abandoned the conciliatory policies of Franklin Roosevelt and taken a provocative hard line against the Russians; and that the Soviet response had reflected a legitimate fear of capitalist encirclement. Walter LaFeber, in America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945 -1967 (1967 and many later editions), maintained that America's supposedly idealistic internationalism at the close of the war—its vision of "One World," with every nation in control of its own destiny—was in reality an effort to ensure a world shaped in the American image, with every nation open to American influence (and American trade).
Ultimately, the revisionist interpretation began to produce a reaction of its own, a "post-revisionist" view of the conflict. Some manifestations of this reaction consisted of little more than a reaffirmation of the traditional view of the Cold War. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., for example, admitted in a 1967 article that the Soviets may not have been committed to world conquest, as most earlier accounts had claimed. Nevertheless, the Soviets (and Stalin in particular) were motivated by a deep-seated paranoia about the West, which made them insistent on dominating Eastern Europe and rendered any amicable relationship between them and the United States impossible.
But the dominant works of post-revisionist scholarship attempted to strike a balance between the two camps, to identify areas of blame and misperception on both sides of the conflict. Thomas G. Paterson, in Soviet-American Confrontation (1973), viewed Russian hostility and American efforts to dominate the postwar world as equally responsible for the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, in The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941 - 1947 (1972) and other works, similarly maintained that "neither side can bear sole responsibility for the onset of the Cold War." American policymakers, he argued, had only limited options because of the pressures of domestic politics. And Stalin was immobilized by his obsessive concern with maintaining his own power and ensuring absolute security for the Soviet Union. But if neither side was entirely to blame, Gaddis concluded, the Soviets must be held at least slightly more accountable for the problems, for Stalin was in a much better position to compromise, given his broader power within his own government, than the politically hamstrung Truman. Melvyn Leffler's Preponderance of Power (1991) argued similarly that American policymakers genuinely believed in the existence of a Soviet threat and were determined to remain consistently stronger than the Soviets in response.
Out of the postrevisionist literature has begun to emerge a more complex view of the Cold War, which de-emphasizes the question of who was to blame and adopts a more detached view of the conflict. The Cold War, historians now suggest, was not so much the fault of one side or the other as it was the natural, perhaps inevitable, result of tensions between the world's two most powerful nations—nations that had been suspicious of, if not hostile toward, one another for nearly a century. As Ernest May wrote in a 1984 essay:
After the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were doomed to be antagonists. . . . There probably was never any real possibility that the post-1945 relationship could be anything but hostility verging on conflict. . . . Traditions, belief systems, propinquity, and convenience . . . all combined to stimulate antagonism, and almost no factor operated in either country to hold it back.
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/2nd%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%202/7%20Paterson.htm - "The Origins of the Cold War," Thomas G. Paterson
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/2nd%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%202/7%20Chamberlain.htm - "Appeasement at Yalta," William Henry Chamberlin
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/2nd%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%202/7%20Rosenman.htm - "Note on the Crimea Conference at Yalta," Samuel I. Rosenman
Part B: The Cold War Where Historians Disagree - McCarthyism
When the American Civil Liberties Union warned in the early 1950s, at the peak of the anticommunist fervor that is now known as McCarthyism, that "the threat to civil liberties today is the most serious in the history of our country," it was expressing a view with which many Americans whole-heartedly agreed. But while almost everyone accepts that there were unusually powerful challenges to freedom of speech and association in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there is wide disagreement about the causes and meaning of those challenges.
The simplest argument—and one that continues to attract scholarly support—is that the postwar Red Scare expressed real and legitimate concerns about communist subversion in the United States. William O'Neill, in A Better World (1982), and Richard Gid Powers, in Not Without Honor (1995), have both argued that anticommunism was a serious, intelligent, and patriotic movement, despite its excesses. The American Communist Party, according to this view, was an agent of Stalin and the Soviet Union within the United States, actively engaged in espionage and subversion. The effort to root communists out of public life was both understandable and justifiable—and the hysteria it sometimes produced was an unhappy but predictable by-product of an essentially rational and justifiable effort. "Anticommunism," Powers wrote, "expressed the essential American determination to stand against attacks on human freedom and foster the growth of democracy throughout the world. . . . To superimpose on this rich history the cartoon features of Joe McCarthy is to reject history for the easy comforts of moralism."
Most interpretations, however, have been much less charitable. In the 1950s, in the midst of the Red Scare itself, an influential group of historians and social scientists began to portray the anticommunist fervor of their time as an expression of deep social maladjustment—an argument perhaps most closely associated with a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." There was, they argued, no logical connection between the modest power of actual communists in the United States and the hysterical form these scholars believed anticommunism was assuming. The explanation, therefore, had to lie in something other than reality, in a deeper set of social and cultural anxieties that had only an indirect connection with the political world as it existed. Extreme anticommunism, they claimed, was something close to a pathology; it expressed fear of and alienation from the modern world. A person afflicted with the "paranoid style," Hofstadter wrote:
believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years.
Other scholars, writing not long after the decline of McCarthyism, rejected the socio-cultural arguments of Hofstadter and others but shared the belief that the crusade against subversion was a distortion of normal public life. They saw the anticommunist crusade as an example of party politics run amok. Richard Freeland, in The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism (1971), argued that the Democrats began the effort to purge the government of radicals to protect themselves from attacks by the Republicans. Nelson Polsby, Robert Griffith, and others have noted how Republicans seized on the issue of communism in government in the late 1940s to reverse their nearly twenty-year exclusion from power. With each party trying to outdo the other in its effort to demonstrate its anticommunist credentials, it was hardly surprising that the crusade reached extraordinarily intense proportions.
Still other historians have emphasized the role of powerful government officials and agencies with a strong commitment to anticommunism—most notably J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Athan Theoharis and Kenneth O'Reilly introduced the idea of an anticommunist bureaucracy in work published in the 1970s and 1980s. Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes (1998) offers the fullest argument that the Red Scare was, at its heart, directed largely against communists (and not very often against people without any connection to the Communist Party) and that it was orchestrated by an interlocking cluster of official agencies with a deep commitment to the project.
Several scholars, finally, have presented an argument that does not so much challenge other interpretations as complement them. Anticommunist zealots were not alone to blame for the excesses of McCarthyism, they argue. It was also the fault of liberals—in politics, in academia, and perhaps above all in the media—who were so intimidated by the political climate, or so imprisoned within the conventions of their professions, that they found themselves unable to respond effectively to the distortions and excesses that they recognized around them.
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/menace-emerges.html - "Communism and National Security: The Menace Emerges," Ellen Schrecker
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/anticom-network.html - "The Growth of the Anti-Communist Network," Ellen Schrecker
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/state-agenda.html - "The State Steps In: Setting the Anti-Communist Agenda," Ellen Schrecker
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/congcomms.html - "Congressional Committees and Unfriendly Witnesses," Ellen Schrecker
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-blacklist.html - "Blacklists and Other Economic Sanctions," Ellen Schrecker
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-legacy.html - "The Legacy of McCarthyism," Ellen Schrecker
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/mccarthy/navasky.htm - "The Social Costs of McCarthyism," Victor Navasky
http://www.17thc.us/docs/fact-fiction.shtml - Arthur Miller's The Crucible: Fact and Fiction
http://teachers.sduhsd.k12.ca.us/mcunningham/why_i_wrote.htm - "Why I Wrote The Crucible," Arthur Miller
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