Implications Of Communism In The United States

During World War II, citizens of the United States created a strong sense of national identity through military service, military supply manufacturing, and other contributions to the war effort. In the decade following the war, the United States shifted its gaze and group concern from threats of fascism in Europe to threats of spreading Communism emanating from the Soviet Union. Different from the national identity fostered during WWII, the post-war national identity Mark Hamilton Lytle calls “Cold War Consensus” resulted not from contributions to any war effort but from an ingrained sense of mass fear about the implications of Communism for the American way of life. The origin of this consensus stemmed not from the threat of Communism encroaching
Lytle writes that “at the heart of the consensus was the belief shared by liberals and conservatives alike that America had a mission to fight the international Communist menace” (Lytle 14). America, as the world’s beacon of capitalism following unprecedented economic growth following WWII, bore the responsibility of using its economic prowess to fend of anti-capitalist influences at home and abroad. The U.S. accomplished this goal by funneling increasing amounts of federal funding toward the military, developing an atomic bomb, and increasing surveillance of Communist activity to prevent Soviet-directed “domination of the world” (15). American citizens overwhelmingly saw the United States’ capitalistic economic virility as an absolute positive and Communism as an absolute negative. This lack of room for meaningful debate created something of a monolith in American culture, in which citizens believed Communism was an evil set out to tear down the foundations of the traditional American
As with any group they did not understand, America’s adults feared the new, evolving culture of media consumption among teenagers. This age group had no direct power to sway politics and yet their emerging group culture seemed to threaten the traditions of those who never had reason to question their American values. Some adults believed that rock and roll music, violent comic books, and teen movies about drag racing with rebellious characters encouraged middle-class, white teenagers toward “the standards of the lowest class” (27). Adults, regardless of their political leanings, feared that this cultural shift toward lower class behavior cleared a path for “the appeal of totalitarian ideas” and Communism (30). These adults wished to encourage traditional American values in their children with the purpose of preventing a generation of youth from falling into the clutches of the Communist agenda. To them, any new change in American culture may have negative consequences for the nation as a whole, and should, therefore, be prevented, controlled, or stopped. What the dissenting adults failed to realize was the extent to which their insistence on capitalistic American values directly contributed to the development of a culturally separate teenager group, in large part due to the exceptional