Amazon’s new series Fallout starts with the end of the world: News reports of an international crisis interrupt a children’s birthday party, mushroom clouds appear outside, and chaos ensues. The year is 2077, but it feels like the 1950s. In this world, the Cold War never ended, and neither did the consumerism that defined mid-century America.

Two centuries after the opening sequence—when the plot of Fallout shifts into gear—cities are devastated, and communities have descended into violence. But brands endure. Advertisements for “Nuka-Cola” and “Super Duper Mart” litter the new American wasteland. Meanwhile, deep underground, a parallel society of Vault Dwellers live in high-tech shelters, cooking with “Atomic Queen” ovens, watching movies on “Radiation King” VHS players, and snacking on “Sugar Bombs.”

Lucy and Hank MacLean enjoy some relaxation in Vault 33, where it feels a lot like 1950s America. Courtesy of Prime Video.

The show, which might easily be dismissed as suburban nostalgia, is rooted in messy historical reality. In mid-century America, conspicuous acts of consumption defined a society facing the end, spurred in large part by the macabre influence of the bomb—evincing fascination and discomfort.

Today, trotting out the bomb to advertise goods might seem misguided at best and exploitative at worst. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the dawn of a new technological age promised an unleashing of scientific potential, and audiences were entranced. Walt Disney produced the 1957 television special for schoolchildren “Our Friend the Atom,” and President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a very public pro-nuclear campaign called “Atoms for Peace” to reassure the public that the nuclear future was not just about destruction. Meanwhile, atomic advertisers tapped into the excitement of technological modernity while trying to sidestep the true horrors of nuclear war.

Still from a 1950s U.S. Army information film, which appears in the documentary Atomic Café.

So, just as the fictional characters in Fallout sip on Nuka-Cola, real-life Americans of the era sipped a popular cocktail inspired by the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, less than an hour after reports of the successful attack on Hiroshima, members of the Washington Press Club mixed gin, Pernod, and vermouth, charging 60 cents a pour for the “Atomic Cocktail.” It was a smash hit with members of the press—and went on to become particularly beloved in Las Vegas, where atomic tests were a 1950s tourist attraction.

Fallout’s soundtrack features hits such as the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” (1941) and Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” (1957), harking back to a time when songs about the end of the world routinely climbed the Billboard charts. And its reimagined advertisements for “atom powered” wind-up robots and washing detergent that’s as “tough on dirt as a nuclear blast” refer to genuine Cold War-era products that stocked shelves at Macy’s and Sears.

But sometimes marketers weren’t successful in striking a balance between sensationalizing their products and terrifying their audience. Such was the case with a product central to both Fallout and the real-life Cold War home front: the fallout shelter.

One of the show’s main characters is Cooper Howard, “star of stage and screen” and “pitchman for the end of the world.” In advertisements for Vault-Tec, he sells shelters “strong enough to keep out the rads and the Reds.” His pitches close with a promise, made directly to the camera: “You can be a hero, too. By purchasing a residence in a Vault-Tec vault today. Because if the worst should happen tomorrow, the world is going to need Americans just like you to build a better day after.”

A 1951 prototype basement fallout shelter sits on a New Jersey boardwalk. Courtesy of the National Archives.

In real life, a similar directive came from an even bigger celebrity. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a nationwide address encouraging ordinary citizens to build their own fallout shelters. Speaking to around 25 million viewers, Kennedy argued, “We owe that kind of insurance to our families and to our country.” That September, President Kennedy opened an entire issue of Life magazine dedicated to fallout shelters with a letter that made the remarkable claim that “97 out of 100” citizens might survive the next war if they took survival into their own hands. Outsourcing survival to the private sector gave rise to swarms of local businesses. Newsweek estimated that in one week in October 1961, over 31 shelter companies applied for business licenses in Atlanta. In the same month companies like Peace-O-Mind Shelter Corporation in Texas, Survival-All Incorporated in Ohio, Survival Construction Specialist in Denver, and Diamond Blocks in Boston all opened their doors for business.

Driving profit was no afterthought in the development of the Cold War home front; it was central to its social function. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes America immediately following the end of World War II as a “consumers’ republic” defined by the rise of powerful new political language that equated good citizenship with effective consumerism. Shelter businesses, then, attempted to marry two eminently successful ideological constructs of the era: national security and the self-made, individualistic, suburban consumer family. But there were limits to even the best salesman’s pitch. Fallout depicts a nation duped into life underground. But many real-life American households were not so easily convinced—and shelter salesmen routinely went bust, even as the atomic clock ticked close to midnight.

Take James Byrne, a Detroit-based plywood businessman who described the shelter trade as a “can’t miss proposition,” with every political statement from the Oval Office a “million-dollar free advertisement.” As international tensions rose in the summer and fall of 1962, Byrne went door to door trying to make a buck—and failed miserably. “People listen to the sales pitch, take all the literature,” Byrne’s best salesman, Sal George recalled, “ask questions and then just walk away.”

Getting desperate, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Byrne and George loaded up a flatbed truck with their model shelter, drove it around town, dropped the price by $100, and posted a sign reading “FALLOUT SHELTERS—WHILE THEY LAST.”  There was not even a “nibble of a sale.” Eventually, they offered it up free of charge, and a Michigan family hauled the shelter away. “Last I heard from them they were having trouble assembling it. But I’m not asking questions,” said Byrne.

His experience was not unique. Between 1961 and 1963 an estimated 600 shelter companies across the United States filed for bankruptcy. Given the opportunity to purchase their families’ safety, most citizens rejected the salesmen’s pitch.

“The future, my friend, is products,” a fellow actor tells Cooper Howard in Fallout. “You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” Maybe in their world. But history shows us that when faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Americans never really embraced the idea that survival should be a consumer choice.

The post What If Cold War Consumerism Never Ended? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Feeling decisive one morning during my sophomore year of college, I picked my major: Russian. I had been studying the language and was excited for the opportunity to read literature, learn about another part of the world, and become bilingual. I updated my student profile on the university’s website and marched triumphantly to the cafeteria for lunch.

There, I ran into an acquaintance and told him the news. He looked at me quizzically, then scornfully. “You realize it’s not the Cold War anymore, right?” he said.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago and with divisions over democracy, authoritarianism, and control of resources resurfacing, many have warned of a “new” Cold War. But ironically, as Russia once again dominates headlines as a geopolitical foe of the United States, Russian language enrollments have hit historic lows.

Americans are responding to conflict by closing themselves off from an adversary, rather than trying to learn about it. But by “canceling” Russian, the U.S. isolates itself from a world that extends far beyond Moscow—a vast geography that isn’t Russia, but where Russian remains the lingua franca. Learning to speak Russian isn’t just about negotiating with one large country ruled by a stubborn dictator. It’s about understanding that swath of the world where Russian is a common first or second language, about getting to know the diverse life experiences, desires, and philosophies of people who once lived under a socialist empire, and about better understanding both other cultures and our own in the process.

Foreign language study in the U.S. as we know it grew out of the Cold War. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, leaders in Washington worried that the U.S. lagged in scientific advancement and that it lacked expertise about the rest of the world. To close the knowledge gap, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958.

Among other initiatives, the law created Title VI “Language Development” programs that provided grants for institutional study centers, and scholarships for individual students, recognizing that mastering a language requires resources beyond what traditional college courses can offer. Though the act’s wording prioritized national defense, in practice it has funneled resources to undergraduate and graduate students conducting all kinds of study, from literature to musicology.

Language study got a further boost after a 1979 presidential commission reported that foreign language education in U.S. schools was falling behind once again. In 1976, only 17% of 7th through 12th graders were studying a foreign language; Russian had suffered the most precipitous decline, dropping by 33% from 1968.

It makes sense—Russian’s alphabet is strange, its grammar intricate, and its vocabulary hard to memorize. The payoff is far slower than that of the Romance languages. In response, in 1983, Congress created another set of appropriations, known as Title VIII, to fund language training and research specifically in what is now the former Soviet Union.

Since 2002, the annual Survey of Enrollments in Russian Language Classes—which was created by Congress and is now administered by the private School of Russian and Area Studies—has tracked Russian enrollments. In general, they have fluctuated along with university enrollments, peaking in 2011 and declining during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in 2022, things took a turn. Enrollment numbers had never been so low and had never dropped by more than 20% in so many programs. The average university Russian program now counted 37 students. (In 2013, when I graduated, that number was 50.)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to be the key factor in this decline. “Many students have reportedly sought to distance themselves from anything Russia related,” wrote the authors of the survey’s 2022 report. Instead of approaching conflict by learning as much as possible about Russia, this time around Americans wanted nothing to do with it.

The problem is symptomatic of an increasing narrowness in the U.S.’s approach to the world, visible in declining support for the humanities, social sciences, and education at large, and in blinkered “America First” politics. And while the most immediate consequences of this solipsism will show up in diplomacy between Washington and Moscow, its impact extends far beyond those cities—and beyond politics.

My experience speaks to this. Since graduating from college, I’ve almost exclusively used my Russian outside the metropole, communicating with people educated under the Soviet Union who are not ethnically Russian. In 2014, I spent a year in Kyrgyzstan on a Fulbright fellowship, and honed my skills drinking tea late into the night with my roommate. When I moved to Mexico in 2019, one of the first people I befriended was from Belarus; we, too, communicated in Russian. Later that year, a friend who works as an attorney called on me to translate for pro-bono clients of hers—Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik families seeking asylum in Mexico.

Today, I maintain my Russian in weekly Skype sessions with a tutor in Kyiv. When Putin first invaded Ukraine, we “canceled” Russian in our own private way, switching to a beginner Ukrainian textbook. I welcomed the opportunity to diversify my knowledge of Slavic languages. I thought often of Russian poet Polina Barskova, who has said she considers translating from Ukrainian into English—and thus sharing Ukrainian culture with a broader audience—her anti-colonial duty. But it was draining repeating basic dialogues without having the time to commit to thorough study of a new language. The spark fell out of our weekly sessions; we missed being able to chat with each other and read literature. We switched back to Russian, but with a commitment to read books that were geographically marginal, feminist, anti-war.

In my solitary time, it’s those writers at the geographic and political fringes of the former Soviet Union that keep me attached to Russian. Though my college classes favored Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, the writers that I pore over slowly in bed in the morning, battling to remember verb prefixes, turning to my phone’s Google translate app for help, are those who capture life in the provinces—Andrei Platonov, Chingiz Aitmatov—and women: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva. Some, like Svetlana Alexievich and Oksana Vasyakina, occupy the center of the Venn diagram. They’re important to me because, more than any Anglophone writers I know, they speak to the way that humans nourish their spiritual and interpersonal needs under repressive political regimes—a question I find myself considering more frequently as the U.S. increasingly undermines the democratic processes it once invested so much in creating.

In Voices from Chernobyl, Alexievich’s polyphonic novel about the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, one character narrates (in Keith Gessen’s translation):

Picture us, with a three-liter bottle of moonshine…having these endless conversations. There were teachers and engineers among us, and then the full international brigade: Russians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians…I remember discussions about the fate of Russian culture, its pull toward the tragic…only on the basis of Russian culture could you begin to make sense of the catastrophe. Only Russian culture was prepared for it.

When Alexievich’s narrator refers to Russian culture, he’s referring to something far more expansive than Putin and his supporters. Those who are making sense of the catastrophe are working people from all corners of a crumbling empire, using a shared tongue to philosophize together. Those perspectives enrich the world and help us understand it. We lose access to them when we can’t understand their language.

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As the United States sends stockpiles of weapons to Ukraine, another transatlantic mobilization is underway. Freed from two years of COVID restrictions and testing requirements, Americans are once again traveling in large numbers. Market observers have predicted a six-fold increase in American tourism to Europe compared to summer 2021.

If you’re wondering what shipments of weapons and planeloads of tourists have in common, the answer is: quite a bit. Tourism has long had a way of getting mixed up in international politics.

It is easy to overlook tourism’s political importance. After all, most Americans journey abroad seeking fun or exposure to a country’s history, food, and art. The goal is usually to escape news headlines, not study them in detail.

Tourism is also easy to dismiss as a superficial activity involving pre-packaged, staged encounters. The word “tourist” began in the 18th century as a neutral synonym for “traveler,” but, as the literary historian James Buzard has shown, cultural sophisticates soon turned the word into an insult. Starting in the mid-19th century, self-declared travelers sought to bolster their own cultural status by ridiculing tourists as thoughtless sheep. The most famous American version of this anti-tourist position came from popular historian Daniel J. Boorstin. In his 1962 book, The Image, Boorstin lamented how the rise of convenient transportation across the oceans rendered travel experiences “diluted, contrived, prefabricated.” According to Boorstin, a genuine traveler takes risks and interacts with locals, while tourists merely follow someone else’s script.

The U.S. Information Agency (USIA) saturated travel agencies and airlines with this booklet. Photo taken by author. Courtesy of U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

It’s a mistake to stereotype tourists in this way. The historical record shows that tourists are pretty good at thinking for themselves. My research uncovered many examples. Here is one: Exactly 70 years ago, as the Korean War raged and the Iron Curtain divided Europe, the U.S. government decided to coach American tourists on how to prepare for encounters with communists and their supporters. It was the height of McCarthyism in the United States, but grassroots communist movements thrived in Western Europe. In fact, many of the waiters and chambermaids serving Americans in France’s luxury restaurants and hotels belonged to communist labor unions. So, in 1952, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), working with civic organizations, saturated travel agencies and airlines with a booklet, “What Should I Know When I Travel Abroad?” If Americans met a Western European who wanted to negotiate with Moscow, the booklet suggested that Americans respond politely but firmly: “It seems to us that in the fight between what is right and what is wrong there just isn’t room for neutralism.”

Actual tourists, however, didn’t follow the script. The USIA interviewed several hundred Americans in their homes after their 1952 trips. Most appreciated the booklet, and a surprising share—71 percent—claimed they read it cover to cover. Still, the government’s diplomatic experts found troubling signs. When it came to explaining something as basic as “America’s concern with Communism,” the report found Americans “ill-equipped.” Alarmingly, the USIA learned that Americans took “a less-determined stand” on European neutralism than their government’s recommendation. Fully one-third said that their travels helped them understand European desires for negotiating with the Soviets. One tourist admitted to the USIA, “I couldn’t say anything. I could only sympathize.”

Indeed, international travel can help build solidarity with other countries. As the USIA learned, tourists aren’t so good at following specific political talking points, but tourism has, historically, instilled a sense of which foreign places matter to the United States. Why is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) so popular in the United States today? One reason is that Americans have for so long visited Europe in search of cultural treasures—making those nations feel like part of a shared community. When World War I erupted, wealthy Americans who had traveled to Europe before the war became the most vocal advocates for U.S. entry into the conflict, citing their tourist memories, especially of embattled France. One influential magazine in 1917 offered a lavish 16-page photograph spread showcasing French tourist sites “to help perpetuate … the bond of romantic affection” linking America to France. During the next war, while Adolf Hitler posed for snapshots by the Eiffel Tower, best-selling books like The Last Time I Saw Paris built U.S. commitment for fighting Germany with travel writing that described France as part of Americans’ own heritage.

What does the political nature of tourism mean for today? For starters, Americans with the ability to travel abroad should think more deliberately about combining politics with pleasure when choosing their destinations. NATO’s self-defense clause obliges the United States to risk World War III for the safety of countries like Estonia. My guess is that few Americans could locate Estonia on a map. Next summer, why not skip Paris or Rome and visit Estonia’s charming capital of Tallinn? Learning about newer NATO members will help Americans develop more informed opinions on the risks and rewards of their nation’s foreign commitments.

Government officials themselves should give more attention to tourism’s ability to sustain those bonds of affection. The American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan has called on Taiwan’s government to welcome more foreign tourists as a matter of “national security.” The U.S. government would be wise to give tourism similar attention. When it comes to popular culture, politicians usually fixate on what’s novel. That’s why, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden White House organized a briefing for TikTok influencers. As far as I can tell, the Biden White House has not reached out to the travel industry or the millions of tourists heading abroad this summer. The president cannot make tourists support his policies, but he can encourage them to listen to and learn from our allies while abroad.

Washington can also help make foreign travel accessible for more Americans. In an age of polarization, international travel remains refreshingly bipartisan. According to a 2021 survey, 41 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans reported having a valid passport. But that percentage drops to 21 percent of Americans with annual incomes under $50,000. In 1949, the widely respected journalist Norman Cousins called for government subsidies to help poorer Americans travel abroad. Washington could follow that advice today by waiving passport fees and bolstering exchange programs for low-income Americans—not as a form of charity but as way to broaden Americans’ engagement with foreign policy.

Overseas vacations have always involved politics alongside leisure and escapism. Your next vacation by itself will not change the world, but it will become part of the next chapter in international history.

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The term “agent of chaos” has been rattling around in the back of my brain since a billionaire announced his intention to acquire a “sporadically profitable social company,” to quote the New York Times, for $44 billion, roughly 19 percent of his net worth. Some used it in the negative, but mostly it was the fandom who murmured it, admiringly, after news of the purchase broke. Their trickster king, at it again.

In this chaotic period, people like Elon Musk, who seemingly wield chaos like a lightning rod, have become lauded for such acts, regardless of their motivations, or plans, or if they even end up seeing them through. And this moniker, “agent of chaos,” has come to cloak them in a kind of neutrality—after all, they’re just sowing chaos for chaos’ sake. The label, I’ve noticed, not only seems to absolve them of any responsibility, but even holds up their pot-stirring as some kind of noble act.

The use of “agent of chaos” in this way appears to have come into vogue after the late Heath Ledger, playing the Joker, popularized the term in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

“​​Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” the oft-quoted line begins. “I’m an agent of chaos,” the Joker continues, “and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

The Dark Knight, which came out in 2008, was widely considered a commentary on the American invasion of Iraq. The Joker, in turn, spoke to fans who embraced the character as the philosophical anarchist the times demanded: “He serves as a chaotic mascot for discord in an overly ordered world that ironically, to them, makes no sense,” explains a Comic Book Reviews article that gets at the character’s appeal, adding that the Joker “disrupts the status quo, standing in opposition to all society has to offer, and laughs.”

But the agent of chaos archetype is one that humans have been drawn to throughout the ages. The character appears in mythologies, folklores, and religions around the world—from the Coyote, a trickster character who frequents Native American tales, to Anansi the Spider, which originates from the Asante people of Ghana.

The origins of the literal term agent of chaos, however, is somewhat shrouded. The creation of the phrase itself arguably traces back to an 1895 book Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton by German Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel. Its arrival in popular culture appears to have come much later, with the term agent of chaos possibly debuting as late as the Cold War.

Its emergence in the 1960s came at a point when chaos was everywhere. The culture reflected this with offerings like Get Smart, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s parody of the spy genre, where KAOS was a literal institution, in fact, the international organization of evil. Even scientists began taking chaos seriously at this time. In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz published a paper documenting observations from a computer model he’d built to predict the weather. His discovery gave rise to modern chaos theory—which holds that even apparently random systems possess some pattern or order.

It was in this moment that American science fiction author Norman Spinrad published his second novel, titled Agent of Chaos, in 1967.

“As far as I know I invented that term,” Spinrad told me over the phone about Agent of Chaos, which drew new attention during #Brexit for the name of its main character, which so happened to be Boris Johnson.

Years before the real Johnson became a global agent of chaos, Spinrad’s fictional Johnson was the bumbling head of the Democratic League, one of three powers competing for world domination. The League’s main nemesis was the powerful totalitarian Hegemonic Council, led by Vladimir Khustov, but a more dangerous opponent lurked in the background chasing them both: the Brotherhood of Assassins, led by Robert Ching, otherwise known as Agent of Chaos. The book opens with the question, “Which of these leaders would you follow?” But Spinrad cautions against making a hasty judgement. “Don’t make up your mind too fast,” he writes.

Spinrad wrote Agent of Chaos in San Francisco, with the Vietnam War on his mind. “My point was that these two things working together”—democracy and totalitarianism—“end up with a third thing, which is chaos,” he said.

Over time, Agent of Chaos has acquired a cult following, particularly among readers who are incarcerated, many of whom have gravitated toward the novel’s pushback against clear-cut power structures.

“My idea of chaos was more positive,” says Spinrad, reflecting on the work’s legacy. “It was a different idea of consciousness and politics. Now, the agent of chaos is something more negative with things falling apart. In that sense that’s not the way I intended it to be. But there it is.”

With this framing, it’s worth pausing to consider who the agents of chaos of our time really should be.

After all, reading about agents of chaos throughout history, what quickly becomes clear is that while some were bad actors, many were working to better society. I especially appreciated the perspective of professor Namorah Gayle Byrd, who is Chitimacha/Cherokee and an expert on trickster tales. In her writings, she calls attention to how tricksters are actually a force of good because they challenge the status quo and make people reevaluate their choices. That’s why she refers to them as “society’s caretaker.”

If such characters cross a line—and “become oppressors and abuse their power to transform spaces”—then, she argues, they no longer deserve the trickster label.

For those who don’t meet the requirements—because they “use their powers of chaos and transformation to destroy rather than to balance or rebalance societal norms”—they still have an important role of their own to play, according to Byrd. They’re “the types that call the real Tricksters to arms.”

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Bauer and some of her fellow Jan. 6, 2021 rioters have testified that they were divinely inspired to participate in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. They carried crosses and religiously themed posters and participated in a prayer on the Senate floor. Testifying to a congressional committee a few weeks after Bauer’s court appearance, District of Columbia police officer Daniel Hodges, who sustained wounds to the skull and attempts to gouge his eyes out, described seeing the Christian flag directly in front of him as an insurrectionist beat him with his own baton. Other signs read, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” and “Jesus is king.”

The blending of Christian symbols with national imagery is not a new phenomenon in the United States. Some of the earliest European colonizers maintained that the formation of the U.S. was a divinely ordained set of events. But the type of white Christian nationalism witnessed on Jan. 6 is also a product of the Cold War.

In the 1950s, relations between the United States and the USSR dissolved into an arms race nursed by fears that World War II was just a prelude to a more cataclysmic war. Some evangelical leaders converted the political threat of communism into the detrimental religious threat to the very soul of the nation. Billy Graham, the late traveling evangelist and preacher, called on all Americans to engage in a “born again” experience in hopes of not just saving their personal souls for the afterlife but providing the United States spiritual warriors against the godless communists. In Graham’s theologizing of Cold War realpolitik, America was divinely good while the USSR was satanically evil. In one early sermon at his “Los Angeles Crusade,” Graham told his listeners: “Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself, who has declared war against Almighty God.”

From the white evangelical perspective, the divine protection from communism afforded to the United States required evangelicals’ ongoing religious and political labor. White evangelicals prayed for the nation within their homes and churches and galvanized their membership base. Billy Graham, by then pronounced the “preacher to the presidents,” met publicly and privately with each president starting in 1950 with Harry Truman.

As America was experiencing a post-war manufacturing boom, white evangelicals were manufacturing born-again souls. New evangelical denominations emerged in the religious marketplace along with mass publications, seminaries, and mission organizations, which yielded thousands of new converts. And while many children were under their desks practicing for a possible nuclear holocaust, white evangelicals were placing their faith in the divine as a security measure against the evil communist enemy.

A spiritual arms race for political superiority developed within the collective theology of white evangelicals. Within this construction, the war against communism and the atheist Soviet “Evil Empire” could only be won if the U.S. was a godly Christian nation. In 1954, the federal government revised the Pledge of Allegiance to this end—now, the United States was “one nation, under God.” Fearful of a nuclear holocaust, white evangelicals, as well as many other Americans, took solace in the fact that the U.S. had established itself as a god-protected nation.

Even though white evangelicals saw their interests manifest, there loomed below the surface a suspicion that godless conspirators would undermine their efforts. Developments in the political and social spheres affirmed this suspicion. The first crack in the godly shield emerged in 1962, when the Supreme Court banned public prayer in schools. The chaos and upheaval of the civil rights era solidified evangelical fears that the U.S. was straying from the divine purpose upon which it had been founded. They grew to despise the direction that liberalism and equity measures took the country.

In their fear and loathing, white evangelicals needed to blame someone, something, or a group of people for the ways in which the United States failed to align with their vision. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, white evangelicals turned their attentions to a list of internal threats—including liberals, secular humanists, LGBTQ people, the poor and disenfranchised, activist Hollywood actors and sports stars, the ACLU, and pro-choicers. The shorthand for these enemies remained “Commies.”

But even if the enemy has the same moniker, today’s white evangelicals are skeptical of the American government’s ability to properly filter out internal threats. In previous decades, white evangelicals relied heavily on government officials, like then Senator Joseph McCarthy, to do their bidding. Today, many white evangelicals think that elected officials are part of a covert attempt to instate eventual persecution of white evangelicals. One poll found that a majority of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump was working against a “deep state” network attempting to undermine his policies.

Paranoia in white evangelicalism has festered in recent decades. The number of those affiliating with white evangelicalism is shrinking. Prayer has not been reinstated in public schools, abortion remains legal, and evolution endures as a standard scientific explanation. This suspicion of the American government and fellow citizens creates a collective marginalization complex—white evangelicals think that they are under attack. This means some of them are willing to take matters into their own hands with spiritual and physical measures.

In a convoluted way, the Jan. 6 insurrection was an attack on communism, or at least what white evangelicals understand as communism within their country: an evil so persistent that they needed to defend the nation and themselves. “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley articulated this on the Senate floor, when he loudly thanked his god for “allow[ing] us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down.” For insurrectionists like Chansley and Bauer, our current federal government is godless, moving toward communism, and, thus, un-American. While Chansley has been sentenced to a 41-month prison term, he echoes a call to arms against the sentencing of America to damnation. These religious rioters seek a national conversion, even if it requires the use of spiritual and physical force. What remains to be determined since the insurrection is what needs saving—the church or the state.

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“War and Peace,” by the artist Anton Refregier, is a reminder of what might have been had the U.S.—and the world—learned enough from two catastrophic wars and the rise of fascism between them to have chosen a different path. When Refregier painted it 75 years ago at one end of the Rincon Annex post office building in downtown San Francisco, the mural expressed the then-widespread hope for a future that didn’t happen.

In 1940, Refregier, a resident of Woodstock, New York, won a prestigious juried competition to paint 27 murals for the post office lobby. His award was one of the largest commissions sponsored by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a New Deal initiative to embellish federal buildings with work by leading American artists. It also was one of its most provocative commissions, because the mural cycle Refregier envisioned would represent the full, messy history of San Francisco, including its racial and class divisions—subjects rarely, if ever, seen on post office walls.

World War II postponed the project, and in 1943, Congress terminated the Treasury Section and transferred his commission to the new Public Buildings Administration. Refregier mourned the loss for himself and for the nation; he said that the Treasury Section’s commissions “would have eventually developed into a monumental art of world significance,” like Mexico’s murals, had it not been killed.

In spring 1945, Fortune magazine sent Refregier to San Francisco to make drawings of the United Nations Conference on International Organizations. The gathering was designed to abort another world war, or worse.

Just two weeks before the meeting’s opening, a cerebral hemorrhage felled the man who’d conceived the United Nations. The conference delegates mourned Franklin Roosevelt’s absence at the opening, and a month later, they met in an ancient grove of redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument to dedicate a plaque that named him “the chief architect of the United Nations and Apostle of Lasting Peace for All Mankind.”

Roosevelt’s death and the political jockeying Refregier witnessed at the U.N. conference inspired him to create “a magnificent climax” to a mural cycle showing a city largely built on conflict. While keeping most of his original plan for the mural, he scrapped his design for the final piece (a panoramic painting of the San Francisco world’s fair of 1939) and replaced it with a triptych—a three-paneled picture—depicting the healing of old wounds through international cooperation and the price of not doing so.

In the left panel, an immense armored hand rises from a pile of burning books, a swastika flag, and concentration camp prisoners to confront the massed guns of the Allies. In the right panel, people of all races gather round a circular table covered with the flags of many nations, the sun of a new day rising behind them.

Refregier sought to bridge the two antithetical pictures with a portrait of Roosevelt in the center. He was inspired by a photo of the ailing president on his return from a hazardous wartime trip to meet Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt’s face, the artist said, was that of a “tired, sensitive, and completely beautiful” man who “lives in the heart and the minds of the people” and thus “belongs to the history of this city.” He would dedicate the entire cycle to the memory of the late president.

Refregier returned to San Francisco in June, 1946 to paint the lobby, but he quickly fell afoul of unsympathetic bureaucrats in the Public Buildings Administration. His new superiors in Washington ordered him to remove Roosevelt, telling him that the image of a recently deceased president was inappropriate for a federal building. With the support of intellectuals, unions, and other artists, Refregier resisted for seven months, but he ultimately capitulated to what he saw as the forces that were even then launching the Cold War.

“It was necessary,” he said, “to erase the image of Roosevelt and his plans for coexistence, peace, and hope of friendship with the Soviet Union in order to see the American people on to the Cold War.”

Courtesy of The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The artist replaced Roosevelt’s face with a multiracial group looking to the United Nations for a fulfillment of the “four freedoms” that the president had named in his 1941 State of the Union address. In addition to the freedoms of speech and religion, Roosevelt had insisted that two more freedoms—from fear and from want—should become global human rights. Four golden pillars stood on the Opera House stage during the U.N. conference to represent those freedoms.

But the world was not to be freed of fear or want. As Refregier foresaw, the Cold War erased the hopes Roosevelt had inspired for peace and economic freedom, while the McCarthy era brought purges against those who shared Roosevelt’s vision. Led by nationalist organizations and the Hearst press, efforts to censor or destroy Refregier’s murals began even as he was painting them. In 1949, Representative Richard Nixon responded to a concerned American Legionnaire, “I believe a committee should make a thorough investigation of this type of art in government buildings with the view to obtaining the removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.” Three years later and just a few months into Nixon’s vice presidency, the House Committee on Public Works met in Washington to consider the destruction of Refregier’s murals.

With strong support from the San Francisco Establishment and beyond, the murals survived but the post office did not. In 1979, the building was redeveloped as a multi-use complex. Its current owners maintain the extant lobby as a public space listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today, just steps from where the nations of the world once met to sign the U.N. Charter, a growing legion of the homeless, hungry, and sick shuffle city streets below opulent towers. They testify to how very far San Francisco, the nation, and the world have veered from Roosevelt’s freedom from want and freedom from fear.

At a time when collective global action is needed to address climate chaos, pandemic disease, nuclear weapons, and resurgent fascism, few today look to the U.N. as the congress of nations Roosevelt and Refregier hoped it would become.

Like Roosevelt’s face, the purpose for which it was created has been erased.

The post The Mural So Controversial Nixon Tried to Remove It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And then he sings. 

The song is about children who walk round and round the yard of an orphanage, but are not orphans. One watches as his father is taken away from their home in shackles. Another wants to write a letter to her parents in an internment camp as she wonders: Does anyone know where I am?

When he finishes, the audience erupts into boisterous applause that morphs into synchronized clapping. The man leans into the mic: “I have a few songs left. Shall we leave this clapping till the end?” The audience laughs and cheers. “Noooo!” someone shouts. He tunes his guitar, clears his throat, and begins another song.  

The year is 1983. The Cold War is still very cold, though U.S. President Ronald Reagan is a few years away from bossing the Soviet president about tearing down a wall. Men at Work’s “Down Under” and Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” are at the top of the U.S. charts. The Police will soon embark on their final official tour, with openers Joan Jett and A Flock of Seagulls. 

This auditorium—at a community college on Chicago’s north side—is smaller and plainer than the ones The Police will play. Just 300-some seats, each filled for the first of four concerts organized by and for Polish-American activists, who have come to hear this performer and his acoustic guitar: Jacek Kaczmarski, the beloved bard of Solidarity—Poland’s massive social justice movement, nearly 10-million strong. 

Born in 1957 in Warsaw to an artist couple, Kaczmarski studied polonistyka—historic and modern Polish language and literature—at the University of Warsaw in the 1970s. While still in school, he performed in cabarets, writing ballads that, through references to Polish history and art, commented on oppressive communist politics and restrictive policies. 

Like any non-state-sanctioned artistic expression in an authoritarian country, Kaczmarski’s work carefully threaded the line between open critique and coy allusion. His ballads were filled with true stories of heroism that celebrated Polish resistance and heart. It was the exact opposite of the communist regime’s approach, which sought to depress national pride, and maintain control, by lying and casting blame.

Kaczmarski’s audiences loved him, and he soon began giving solo performances in private clubs and homes to avoid the scrutiny of the censorious government. He graduated in 1980, the same year that the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union, also known as “Solidarity”—whose membership included nearly one-third of Poland’s population—was officially recognized by Poland’s government as an independent trade union, the first of its kind in the entire Soviet Bloc. Kaczmarski too was a member and regularly played at Solidarity events. His ballad “Mury” (“Walls”) became the movement’s unofficial anthem, regularly chanted at protests. Supporters scrawled its lyrics on government buildings and park benches. 

The movement was led by electrician Lech Wałęsa and welder Anna Walentynowicz, shipyard workers in Gdansk. Both were members of anti-communist, underground trade unions in the 1970s, which staged strikes and called for workers’ rights reform. In the summer of 1980, the communist government increased already high food prices, and the country erupted into a series of labor strikes. These accelerated when Walentynowicz, who edited an underground newsletter, was fired for her open criticism. She was five months from retirement, which meant she wouldn’t receive any benefits. In response, shipyard workers staged a strike demanding she be reinstated at work.

Although the shipyard caved within days, the workers kept striking—calling for higher pay, improved working conditions, and civil rights, including the freedom of expression—until the end of August, when the government formally recognized Solidarity. The union soon also received statements of support from the U.S. government and the Vatican. 

Solidary continued its activism. But by the end of the year, the communist government had had enough. On December 13, 1981, nearly 2,000 military tanks began rolling down Polish streets, soon joined by thousands of combat vehicles and 100,000 members of the militia and secret police. 

Ultimately, around 5,000 Solidarity members were arrested and put into detention cells. Their children were placed into orphanages, becoming orphaned non-orphans. TV and radio stations went silent. Borders were closed. At 6 a.m., the official state Polish Radio declared martial law. The days that followed were violent and bloody. A Solidarity-organized protest at the Wujek Coal Mine ended with thousands more arrests, beatings, and shootings, and multiple deaths. The youngest casualty was 19 years old. 

Kaczmarski was abroad when martial law was announced. That October, he had begun touring with a French exhibition about Solidarity. Like many Poles around the world, he obsessively scoured for news as the strikes and arrests and deaths continued. And he kept performing, which is what brought him to the United States. One of his first stops was New York, where he met filmmaker Richard Adams.

“Our nation wants to create its life based on its own history,” Kaczmarski told Adams in 1982, after a performance in Brooklyn, for the documentary Citizens for Solidarity. “Not history as told by communist propaganda.”

Adams was deeply moved by the music’s complexity, and its message. “I felt that Kaczmarski’s singing had an intellectual, historical, moral and purely verbal richness that made American songs sound like jingles,” he told me, in a recent interview. 

After New York, Kaczmarski came to Chicago for a sold-out concert series where he worked through an extensive set list of ballads written both before and after martial law. The pre-martial-law ballads dipped in and out of 19th- and 20th-century Polish history, presenting the Polish heroism often absent from post-World War II communist history books. The more recent ballads focused on the present, and were even bolder: mocking the communists, despairing the hopelessness of seemingly never-ending oppression. 

“Sen Katarzyny II-giej” (“Catherine the Great’s Dream”) presents the love/hate affair between the voracious Russian czarina and one of her favorite lovers, Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski. Kaczmarski’s baritone lowered to a guttural growl as he relished his way through the bawdy lyrics: “I need a lover as big as the [Russian] empire / who’d take me the way I give my all.” 

In “Raport Ambasadora” (“The Ambassador’s Report”) a Polish nobleman protests the first partition of Poland in 1783: “‘Traitors!’ some shouted, but who to whom?…Win whatever you can win!” Kaczmarski spit out each and every syllable, then shifted to draw out a long vowel. 

In “Listy” (“Letters”) Kaczmarski sang about the Cuban poet Armando Valladares, imprisoned by Castro for decades. “When I wrote this song, his case seemed hopeless,” Kaczmarski told the audience that night. “But that spring he was freed. This song is about waiting, and hope.” 

He also sang what he called “a love letter” to the Russian actor and poet Vladimir Vysotsky, whom he’d met in 1974. Their lives came to have multiple chilling similarities, including early deaths. 

And then, “Mury,” initially written in 1978, about the walls that can surround artists and their creativity—and by 1981 an anti-communist anthem for Poles everywhere. The Chicago audience sang along: “The walls will fall, fall, fall, and bury the old world.”

The plain black album cover for the concert recording of Polish singer Jacek Kaczmarski’s 1983 performance in Chicago was designed to evade confiscation by government authorities. His music delved into Polish history and criticized Communist oppression. Courtesy of Justine Jablonska.

Each of Kaczmarski’s concerts in Chicago was recorded for a double vinyl record album. My dad supervised the recording in a sound booth above the balcony; he and my mom were part of the Polish American activist group that organized the concerts. The album cover was black with a blank, white rectangle; the back completely white. No writing on the cover, representing the communist censorship that sought to muzzle Kaczmarski (in the autumn of 1981, the Soviet embassy in Poland had issued an official statement denouncing the “anti-Soviet” nature of Kaczmarski’s rhetoric). 

The spare design would also help the albums slip past customs: his music was anathema to the communist authorities monitoring all incoming shipments during martial law. Hundreds of these albums would make their way to Poland over the next few years, accompanied by a fake liner: “Windy City” presents Rhythm and Blues extravaganza.

My brother and I met Kaczmarski that night in Chicago in ’83, ushered backstage during the act break by our parents. We solemnly presented the singer with a crayon drawing we’d labored over earlier that day: a brick wall, tall on one side, crumbling on the other. Above a stick figure wearing glasses and holding a guitar, I’d printed MURY in my childish hand. Kaczmarski took in the drawing for a few moments, and thanked us.

Kaczmarski kept touring. Anti-communist protests continued. Solidarity kept at it. Until April 1989, when the Round Table Talks officially ended communist rule in Poland. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. And at the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. 

Kaczmarski spent the rest of his life traveling, and settled in Australia for a while. He regularly returned to Poland but never lived there again. He drank heavily, alcoholism an ever-present demon, and in his mid-40s, was diagnosed with throat cancer. After a tracheotomy, he lost his voice, and by early 2004, could no longer speak. He died in April 2004, at the age of 47, and is buried in Warsaw. 

My parents still have the master tapes of the Chicago concert recordings; they’ve never been digitized or shared, beyond the albums that were shipped to Poland. My copy of the record plays perfectly to this day. It’s a treasured possession, a time capsule. In the recording I can hear my mom laughing at something Kaczmarski has said. I know that somewhere in that applause, my brother and I are clapping. I have no photos or videos from the concert. But I have this record. 

I reach to it in times of turmoil and uncertainty. The album reminds me that dark times come, and dark times go—as long as brave people exist to speak the truth. I recently watched a short clip of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film Blind Chance, from 1981, about a character who, in one of three alternative storylines, becomes a member of the Polish opposition movement. Kaczmarski appears as himself in a short cameo, singing “Nie Lubie” (“I Hate”) at an underground Solidarity meeting. 

He looks very young, very intense. “I hate myself when I feel fear / When I look for excuses for the wicked,” he sings. His lyrics are sharp and defiant, an eternal cry for justice in the face of tyranny. 

The post The Beloved Bard of Solidarity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event, titled “What Would a New Cold War Mean for the World?” and part of a series on global challenges called “The World We Want,” offered a fast-paced look at dozens of aspects of the Chinese-American relationship, from their economic interdependence to their 5G networks, and from their military competition to the mutual hostility between countries that shows up in public opinion surveys.

The conversation also turned repeatedly to the possibility of military conflict of Taiwan, with two panelists suggesting China could move to reunite the island by force with the mainland in the next few years.

The event’s moderator, New York Times associate managing editor Philip P. Pan, who spent much of his career reporting in China, started the conversation by asking to what extent the features of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union can be seen in conflict between the U.S. and China today.

Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished University of Toronto historian and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us, said that the two conflicts both involved two large powers with global ambitions and reach. “The United States and the Soviet Union claimed to be speaking for a better part of the world,” she said. “We have elements of that in the current tension between China and the United States.”

But, she suggested, it is the differences that matter more. The U.S.-China relationship, MacMillan said, is not as ideological as the old Cold War, and the U.S. has a much closer relationship with China, especially as a leading trading partner, than it did with the economically isolated USSR. Another crucial difference: The U.S. and the Soviet Union were such dominant superpowers that they were able to pressure other countries in the world to take their side, while today’s world is more multipolar, with other major powers having enough autonomy and weight not to be drawn in.

Still, MacMillan cautioned, the fact that the U.S. and China are inherently closer to each other might actually produce more friction.

She recalled that before World War I, Germany and Britain were each other’s largest trading partners; four members of the British cabinet had been educated in Germany, and the British royal family’s lineage was quite German. Despite these elite connections, MacMillan said, public opinion turned hostile in each country against the other as war broke out.

“That is what concerns me today,” said MacMillan, nodding to the increasingly negative public sentiment in China and the U.S. toward the other at present. “The historical record isn’t that reassuring.”

Another panelist, Oriana Mastro, an FSI Center Fellow at Stanford University, warned that popular comparisons of the U.S.-China conflict to the Cold War could produce flawed strategies for dealing with today’s problems.

China, she said, is a profoundly different rival than the Soviet Union in that it is not trying to turn democracies into autocracies, and is not perceived as a military or security threat to other countries. Because China is in Asia, the most dynamic and populous part of the world, “China doesn’t have to be a power elsewhere to be a superpower; dominating Asia is enough, and that’s where it is focusing its energies and its military.”

But that focus on Asia might make this conflict more dangerous in some ways than the Cold War. “The military confrontation between China and the United States is going to happen in Asia,” said Mastro. “This competition is much more likely to turn hot than it ever was with the Soviet Union.”

After Pan asked whether countries would be pressed to choose sides between two superpowers, as in the Cold War, Mastro, who is also a Defense and Foreign Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that China is not going to form its own bloc because it does not want a coalition forming against it. She referred to writing from Chinese strategists noting that the U.S. already has locked up the best partners—the world’s democracies, and richest nations.

Instead, she said, China is turning its lack of coalition into an advantage in its contest with the U.S. While the American government makes heavy demands of partner countries (such as economic or democratic reform, or providing military bases), China typically asks other nations merely to choose neutrality in the U.S.-China conflict, and to avoid talking about sensitive topics like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

“When countries choose neutrality, when they choose not to take a side at all, in effect, they are choosing China,” Mastro said. “It’s very hard for the United States to build coalitions against China … because we ask so much more.”

Meanwhile, while China is more focused on economic issues than military ones, Mastro warned that the country is using its extensive economic and technological expertise to enhance the lethality of its military. And China’s ability to gather a lot of data through its technological expansion could allow it to target elites in other countries.

For instance, she said, “They could use targeted cyberattacks to disrupt someone’s life who says something bad about Taiwan.”

Striking a much more optimistic tone than the other two panelists, the third panelist, UCLA Anderson distinguished professor Christopher S. Tang, argued that China’s new trade agreement with the European Union—in which China expressed new willingness to cooperate on technology transfer and meeting international labor standards—might provide an opening for less conflict, and more peaceful cooperation between the U.S. and China.

Tang said the U.S. and other countries should say to China, “We embrace you, we recognize your success, but if you want to win respect in the world, you need to become a leader” in protecting the environment, workers, and intellectual property.

More broadly, Tang argued that the rest of the world needs the U.S. and China to set a strong example of peaceful cooperation. He cited four major global problems that threaten both countries that would be easier to solve if the U.S. and China worked together: COVID recovery and global public health, combating climate change, reducing poverty, and caring for the rapidly aging population

“I think there is a window,” said Tang, pointing to President Xi Jinping’s stated commitment, at last month’s World Economic Forum, to solve global problems. “Why not leverage this moment?”

He described the U.S-China rivalry as primarily economic, and compared it to a 50-year-long chess match. He described President Trump’s trade war as a middle game of this chess contest, which had failed to advance American economic interests, and suggested that President Biden could work to “keep it to a draw … so there will be no winners and no losers.”

The Zócalo/University of Toronto virtual event drew a global audience, and it concluded with questions from the YouTube chat room about whether the Cold War strategy of containment applies to China (not really, panelists said), how Canada should deal with China (carefully and in partnership with other countries, MacMillan answered), about technology’s role in the rivalry, and about how the U.S. should respond to any Chinese military aggression, especially against Taiwan.

On that last subject, both MacMillan and Mastro were emphatic that the threat of conflict over Taiwan is more serious and urgent than generally understood, in part because Chinese leadership is losing patience. Mastro pointed to opinion polls showing that a majority of Chinese citizens support armed reunification with Taiwan—and expect it within three to five years.

That could mean we’re heading toward a very hot U.S.-China war.

The post The U.S.-China Rivalry Isn’t a New Cold War; It’s Bigger Than That appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In response, Linus van Pelt steps up to revive Charlie Brown’s holiday spirit. Calling for a spotlight, he recites the Gospel of Luke 2:8-14, regaling the kids about the birth of Christ, peace on Earth, and goodwill toward men.

Linus’s sermon was no simple Bible recital. Rather, Linus tapped into public guilt over the meaning of Christmas circa 1965. Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz had long insisted that his comic strip had no artistic or social significance, but A Charlie Brown Christmas, written by Schulz and animated by Bill Mendelez, directly addressed the public’s angst over the yuletide festivities. Peanuts’s holiday venture, a Cold War product, reconciled the seasonal impulse to shop with the spiritual values of goodwill, humility, and family togetherness by placing capitalism and Christianity in the mouths of babes.

Muscular Christianity was a long-lived American strength. Centuries earlier, the Puritans had proclaimed God enshrined their new home as a “city on a hill,” and the various spiritual “Awakenings” throughout history brought comfort to Americans during times of social change. By the 1950s, Americans readily weaponized Christianity against the “godless Commies.” Cold Warrior crusaders placed “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. “In God We Trust” became the country’s official motto, ousting the more inclusive “E Pluribus Unum” that had been around since 1776; the Treasury started stamping the phrase on all paper currency in 1957. So when Linus brought God into prime time by referring to the birth of Christ, the cartoon child was merely following the lead of real-life adults.

He was also appealing to, in the words of one contemporary critic, “the jaded appetites of television viewers”—who were burned out on consumerism. The 1950s was a prosperous time for white middle-class suburbanites who rapidly lapped up luxuries that weren’t on offer during the Great Depression and World War II. But not everyone rejoiced; critics complained about how materialism sapped individualism into cardboard cut-outs from the same factory mold. Books such as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Lonely Crowd, and Growing Up Absurd described Americans flailing in a spiritual dearth of meaningless designer colors. The beatniks, delinquents, and an emerging subculture of disenchanted youth would blossom into flower children by the late 1960s.

Peanuts rode to its height in this contradiction of capitalistic Christianity. The perpetual loser Charlie Brown tapped into the national zeitgeist of Americans who could never keep up with the Joneses. While A Charlie Brown Christmas only depicted a certain demographic of the white middle class—the proto-feminist Peppermint Patty and minority characters like Franklin were in the future—Peanuts was subversively poking at the status quo by airing defeat, disappointment, and despair on a regular basis.

The intersection of children, Christianity, and consumerism made 1965 ripe for Peanuts to enter animation. Schulz’s gang of lovable losers made the cover of TIME magazine in April that year, and he felt the timing was right. Schulz insisted on using the Scriptures to “add some meaning to it,” rebutting the usual holiday specials that centered on Winter Wonderlands of toys. For instance, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—where the bullied protagonist finds love as a deliverer for Santa’s goodies—premiered the year before for NBC.

Of course, CBS, in broadcasting a Peanuts special, hoped to reap advertising dollars. For Schulz, though, Peanuts’s world-weary kids wielded a deeper meaning of Christmas. While Schulz himself held no special affinity for drawing children other than that they “sold” comic strips, he recognized that youngsters had a redemptive power based on their innocence. Schulz insisted on casting children rather than adult actors to handle voiceovers, heightening their authenticity as they coped with social forces in a world where no adults are seen or heard. “Christmas is primarily a children’s day, for it takes the innocent faith of a child to appreciate it,” he wrote.

Such purity was personified by Linus van Pelt, who every Halloween faithfully waited in vain for the Great Pumpkin. In 1967, Schulz described Linus as “very bright, but very innocent. He has a way of saying pompous things and then being brought down quickly.” Linus’s downfall usually came at the fist of his bossy sister, Lucy, but his grandiosity made for a spiritual climax as he quotes scripture. Indeed, Linus’s sermon would be reprinted in a Sunday strip a year later and again in December 1985, and, in 1967, Robert Short’s The Gospel According to Peanuts became a bestseller. As for A Charlie Brown Christmas, it won an Emmy and a Peabody Award, and has returned every holiday since.

For Cold War America, Schulz’s sincere message about Jesus’s origins story neatly legitimated the season’s consumer tidings. Schulz had no qualms about the commercialization of his craft, as he remained consistent that the comic strip itself was a commercial product that helped sell newspapers rather than an “art.” Schulz defended his licensing t-shirts, greeting cards, and assorted memorabilia, noting that no one forced the public to buy a Snoopy plush toy. In later comic strips, Schulz would criticize the commercialization of childhood, from Little League to snowmen-building contests. But at the same time, he saw nothing contradictory in selling comic strip collections to a hungry public.

Neither do Linus and friends. After Charlie Brown’s sapling sags under the weight of a single ornament, the gang flocks to the rescue. With Linus’s lead, they ramshackle Snoopy’s award-winning décor to glam up Charlie Brown’s tree. All dolled up, this evergreen goes “commercial,” standing straight and pristine, commoditized like the “modern” Christmas aluminum trees that Charlie Brown had rejected earlier in the special. But Charlie’s rejuvenated tree is “real”—not just because it was actually timber, but because the children construct it, they’re sincere about it, and they do so under a veneer of holy sentiment as they sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” afterward.

This purified mixture of Cold War crusaders, kids, and consumers made A Charlie Brown Christmas an American institution in itself. In addition to the annual airings, the animated special spawned a wealth of merchandise, including composer Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy soundtrack albums, book adaptations, ornaments, and cards. Even the sagging tree itself has ended up on retail shelves in its pathetic glory as a collectible. Ironically, some of these limited-edition gifts sell for big bucks, are breakable, and are definitely not to be handled by children.

This blend of sentimentality and sales endured as central theme in many other Peanuts specials celebrating Americana, many centering on getting stuff: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966); A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973); It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (1974); Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown (1975); Happy New Year, Charlie Brown! (1986); and the baseball-themed Charlie Brown’s All-Stars (1966), with the usual humiliation and redemption. As a perennial favorite, A Charlie Brown Christmas not only became a yearly tradition for families, but also spawned a cinematic universe.

A Charlie Brown Christmas may be timeless in its appeal to long-held American values. But lightning didn’t strike twice. When Schulz and Melendez produced a sequel in 1992, appropriately titled It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, the context and the message had changed. With the Cold War won and Americans entering a consumer boom that saw church attendance slide, Peanuts’s Christmas now centered on what Sally Brown called “getting all you can get while the getting is good.” For his part, Sally’s round-headed brother agonized over selling his comic book collection to buy gloves for the Little Red-Haired Girl.

Noticeably absent was the Lord—Sally Brown, who had sung “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” 27 years earlier, now confused the lyrics with “Harold Angel.” Fittingly, audiences decided it wasn’t Christmastime after all, and this sequel faded into Peanuts obscurity in favor of the original (as did the post-Schulz Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales [2002] and I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown [2003]).

After so many years, A Charlie Brown Christmas has become an adjective, an expression of a situation in which the everyman failure can shine. The special nostalgically reaffirms a middle-class Americanism through religion-fused materialism, and a little child shall lead them.

And that’s the meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown.

The post It’s a Cold War Christmas, Charlie Brown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Throughout the pandemic, public commentators have been quick to draw historical analogies between Trump’s performance and past White House communications. The president’s televised briefings have been compared, often unfavorably, to Abraham Lincoln’s carefully crafted public addresses, or to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. “D.J.T. is No F.D.R.,” one columnist opined.

The promise of “nightly surprises” for the RNC convention has, once again, encouraged political pundits to fixate on the rhetorical work Trump has before him. But while seeking sense and stability from the nation’s historic statesmen is only natural, the drive to find positive examples from the past distracts as much as it illuminates. Sometimes, presidential silence is most constructive for leading citizens through a crisis.

A case in point is a speech that President Kennedy considered delivering on civil defense. Drafted at the height of the Cold War but never presented to the public, this “fireside chat” would have explained what would happen if the Soviet Union launched a surprise attack against the U.S., with the goal of rousing Americans to build their own personal shelters against attack. The story behind Kennedy’s decision to remain silent reveals the enduring limits of presidential communication.

John F. Kennedy’s time as president coincided with a period of international relations often referred to as the nuclear crisis. Bookended by the surprise launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis and signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1962 and 1963, the nuclear crisis was the true high point of the Cold War. When Kennedy entered the Oval Office in 1961, the Kremlin and the Pentagon were engaged in multiple covert operations against each other. Spy networks hunted out military secrets, and cultural warfare was conducted through various media. The two nations also backed proxy conflicts across the globe from Cuba to the Congo.

An artist’s rendition of a basement fallout shelter, from the mid 1950s. As the threat of nuclear war began to feel real to Americans, many built protective home hideouts. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park/Wikimedia Commons.

Nuclear weapons were at the heart of the Kennedy-era Cold War. Military strategists and think tank intellectuals—the people parodied and immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove—saw the proliferation of nuclear warheads as the best way to deter the Kremlin. These “wizards of Armageddon,” as journalist Fred Kaplan branded them, based their judgment on cold, mathematical calculations, and game-theory models of decision making with the aim to predict strategic interactions between the Cold War superpowers. This work led them to embrace a paradox: that more nuclear weapons could create stability; neither side, they argued, would risk attack because of the certainty of an equally violent response.

Mutual assured destruction (unironically referred to as “MAD”) had a tangible impact on U.S. military spending. By 1960, the United States nuclear stockpile consisted of 18,638 missiles, enough to destroy the world many times over. But nuclear war is equal parts foreign and domestic policy—and in 1961, Kennedy’s first year in office, managing public anxiety over nuclear weapons became a major political headache for the administration.

A series of high-profile international incidents turned the topic of Armageddon into water cooler conversation. April brought the public revelation of CIA misadventures in the Bay of Pigs, where 1,400 Cuban exiles launched a botched invasion of Cuba’s south coast in an effort to depose Fidel Castro. In June, during a conference in Vienna, Kennedy engaged in a tense exchange with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over a continuing border dispute in divided Berlin, where a steady stream of emigrants fled East Germany for the West. Refusing to engage Khrushchev in an ideological debate or to guarantee citizenship status for fleeing East Germans made Kennedy appear nervous before the international press. Newspapers on both sides of the Iron Curtain ran stories about a young president “outmatched” and “underprepared”.

On July 25, 1961, Kennedy, still stinging from media coverage of his performance in Vienna, replied to critics at home and abroad in a televised public address in which he implied the U.S. might be willing to risk nuclear war over Germany’s fate and increasing Communist aggression. Staring directly into the camera, under the harsh glare of klieg lights, Kennedy told an audience of 25 million Americans that nuclear war was a real possibility—and that they needed to prepare.

The country had a “sober responsibility to recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age,” the president said, adding that neglecting to show Americans “what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility.” If a nuclear bomb fell on American soil, he suggested, families who were not killed in the initial blast or fires could be saved “if they are warned to take shelter and that shelter is available.” Kennedy affirmed his personal investment in helping the nation-in-crisis, promising “to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of an attack.”

The speech, designed to wake listeners and call them to constructive action, was a disaster: Instead of banding purposefully together, Americans panicked. Previously, the public had been aware of the threat of nuclear attacks and the existence of civil defense—thanks to Federal Civil Defense Administration’s public education campaigns, featuring Bert the Turtle cartoons and duck and cover drills in schools—but apathetic about the practical ramifications of surviving them.

Yet after Kennedy’s speech, they obsessed over building protective shelters. Newspaper reports from the time described anxious families hounding officials at the Office of Civil Defense for information on converting houses, gardens and basements into nuclear bunkers.

The news kept raising new alarms. In August 1961, construction of the Berlin Wall began. A month later, the Soviet Union detonated a 16-kiloton bomb—codenamed “Joe 75”—at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, breaking an international moratorium on nuclear testing that had been in place for nearly three years. Over the next 16 months, the United States and Soviet Union conducted more nuclear tests than they had in the 16 preceding years. Global radiation levels spiked. The Cold War heated up. And thermonuclear war was becoming a real possibility.

While the total number of shelter assembly kits sold between 1961 and 1962 remained relatively low (Consumer Reports estimated around 200,000 were sold), the topic of shelters and survival became an editorial goldmine. LIFE magazine dedicated its September 1961 issue to the “fallout shelter question.” Public intellectuals from Margaret Mead to I.F. Stone produced stunning editorials on the damage privatized survival might have on the national character. TIME reported that some people openly threatened to shoot outsiders who tried to access their private shelter spaces—a strategy the magazine called “gun thy neighbor.”

After the July 1961 address, the Kennedy administration, realizing its misstep, started drafting a new presidential speech and preparing a new civil defense pamphlet, tentatively titled “Fallout Protection and You,” to deliver to every household in the United States. Modeled directly on Roosevelt’s successful Fireside Chats, Kennedy’s new address was intended to right the wrongs of the July message, providing a series of practical steps every household could easily take over the next few months. From September to late December, the administration worked tirelessly on the speech and pamphlet, a blueprint for the nation’s survival.

The task proved far more difficult than anticipated. The writers were dealing with tough content. “One conclusion is that any major nuclear attack on this country would kill tens of millions of people,” one proposed version of Kennedy’s speech stated plainly, adding:

There is no practicable program which would avert incredible destruction, slaughter, horror and chaos. The only way by which we could protect ourselves from the direct of blast, heat and firestorm is by burying our cities deep underground. We could carry out such a program only to the exclusion of nearly everything else in our national life—a course of action which makes no sense to me.

The proposed speech also made direct reference to the potential violence surrounding access to private shelters, with a warning given that “superpatriots” stockpiling private shelters should not “tyrannize their fellow citizens.”

Reading the various drafts, it is striking how honestly the issue of nuclear annihilation was addressed. White House staffers—wrestling with how to ask regular citizens to mount a civil defense with cinder blocks and concrete when there was no practical way for the federal government to do so—began to wonder if the whole exercise was entirely absurd. Some began to refer to the booklet as the “Fallout Is Good for You” guide. Fred Dutton, special assistant to the president, wrote in a memo that “the feel of the pamphlet, especially the drawings, is not reassuring. I suspect a poor public reaction to this.”

Dutton’s response was the mildest among Kennedy’s advisors. Senior White House advisor John Kenneth Galbraith criticized the Department of Defense for allowing some ridiculous ideas into early drafts of the message, including a bizarre reference to a wooden fallout shelter modeled after a frontier log cabin. Chiding the Pentagon in a memo prefaced, “I regard this as a matter of high importance,” Galbraith expressed concern about the political cast of the messaging. Privatized survival was a strategy designed for “saving Republicans and sacrificing Democrats … There are survival plans for people who have individual houses with basements in which lean-to fallout shelters can be built” but “no design for civilians who live in congested areas, tenements, low cost apartments.” The address in its current form, he continued, “seeks to save the better elements of the population, but in the main writes off those who voted for you.” Galbraith found the prospect of a presidential address on the matter “absolutely incredible and particularly injudicious.”

Ultimately, Kennedy’s advisors determined that the best solution, in the words of top aide and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, was to allow the issue to “balloon” away—to “resist” Kennedy’s “natural urge to address the nation.” It would be better to leave the matter to other officials with greater knowledge, and less political profile. Spokespeople from federal agencies would still handle public inquiry, and local officials would work to identify existing public spaces that might be converted in community shelters. But direct communication from the president to the public on the question of privatized civil defense was severed.

There is much to glean from the tumultuous journey of this forgotten and abandoned speech. One crucial lesson is that the messenger matters. As public anxiety grew and the threat of nuclear warfare drew closer, Kennedy’s team came to realize that a presidential address would be unhelpful—because the public trusted experts more than elected officials when it came to their families’ survival.

In our COVID-19 pandemic, we can trace a similar response. As officials rush to reassure the public through an unceasing barrage of updates—muddling statistics and offering deeply questionable advice on using disinfectant in the body—they should consider whether their interventions, like Kennedy’s, result more in fear than faith.

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