It’s just about impossible to keep up with world news without hearing something about the ongoing Climate Summit (COP-26) in Glasgow, held from October 31-November 12, 2021. But are you aware of the Biodiversity Conference that preceded it? This meeting was held in Kunming, China, on October 21, 2021. About that meeting,  The New York Times wrote: 

countries are gathering in an effort to stop a biodiversity collapse that scientists say could equal climate change as an existential crisis.

Concern over environmental issues, including biodiversity, isn’t new. At the height of the Cold War, Dr. Seuss wrote of the danger in his book The Lorax. The book came out just before the first anniversary of Earth Day in 1971. 

According to earthday.org, on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970:

Groups that had been fighting individually against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness and the extinction of wildlife united.

Inspired in part by Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring, over 20 million Americans demonstrated against the impact of 150 years of industrial development. Their effort was quite successful.

By the end of 1970, the first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of other first of their kind environmental laws, including the National Environmental Education Act,  the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Clean Air Act.  Two years later Congress passed the Clean Water Act.  A year after that, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act and soon after the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. These laws have protected millions of men, women and children from disease and death and have protected hundreds of species from extinction.

Although Seuss later called The Lorax ‘straight propaganda,’ the book found a receptive audience in the context of the growing environmental movement, appealing to those concerned with the interrelatedness of ecosystems and/or those concerned with the environmental dangers of capitalism. Take your pick. A case can be made for both.

The Lorax Disappears: Interrelatedness of Ecosystems

Seuss begins his book by tackling a topic that’s of great interest today, deforestation and its impact on biodiversity. A creature called ‘the Lorax’ is missing and there are many questions:

What was the Lorax?
And why was it there?
And why was it lifted and taken somewhere
From the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows?

We soon learn that there is someone who knows the answer to these questions, a man called the Once-ler.  

The Once-ler is a bit greedy and he will only tell you how ‘the Lorax was lifted away’ if you agree to pay. Once you do, he’ll call you by Whisper-ma-phone and tell you secrets that are ‘for your ears alone.’ Lucky for us, a young boy named Ted Wiggins hears the story and decides to pass it on. 

The Once-ler paints Ted a word picture of an idyllic pre-industrial environment, populated by Humming-Fish splashing around, Swomee Swans, and “Brown Bar-ba-loots frisking about in their Bar-ba-loot Suits as they played in the shade and ate Truffula fruits.”

But those trees! Those trees!
Those Truffula Trees!
All my life I’d been searching
for trees such as these.
The touch of their tuft
was much softer than silk.
And they had the sweet smell of fresh butterfly milk.

The Once-ler is so taken by the trees that stretch for “mile after mile in the fresh morning breeze”  that he knows just what to do:

In no time at all, I had built a small shop.
Then I chopped down a Truffula Tree with one chop.
And with great skillful skill and great speedy speed,
I took the soft tuft, and I knitted a Thneed.

Now, we’re off to the races. The Once-ler will soon cut down all the Truffula Trees to create a product called Thneeds, and as Thneeds become a ‘must have’ item, more and more trees will be harvested. 

I’m sure you can guess what happens. Soon there are no more trees, and no more Bar-ba-loots who lived in the trees. Sound familiar?

Today one million of the world’s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction, and many of the ecosystem services essential for human wellbeing are eroding.

So, as it turns out, Seuss was quite prescient. But, even so, I’m a bit confused about the focal point of The Lorax. Environmental concerns in the 1970s weren’t primarily focused on desertification, coral reefs, biodiversity or extinction. Instead, the major issues of the day centered on nuclear and chemical pollution, Three Mile Island, oil spills, soil contamination, toxic waste, herbicides in South East Asia, and, later, the ozone layer.

So why was Seuss concerned with issues of deforestation and biodiversity? I’m just surmising, but one can make an argument that it was all about the Cold War. We know that Seuss was political and perhaps he picked up on a theme that’s detailed in a relatively recent book titled The Cold War and environmental history: complementary fields by Simo Laakkonen, Viktor Pál & Richard Tucker. The book, published in 2016, sees the Cold War as signifying “a global power struggle over the control of natural resources.” It argues:

The Cold War was not only for the hearts and minds of people, it was also for their mouths and bellies, that is, for food, energy and raw materials . . . In addition to the increasing consumption of natural resources and resulting pollution, the destructive capacity of the weapons of mass destruction compelled human beings to recognise that their activities could ultimately endanger the planet earth. The Cold War was a propagator and framework for the birth of global catastrophism and also for the emergence of a global environmental awareness. Nature, its exploitation and also gradually its protection, opened up yet another front in the Cold War . . .

In fact, some of the areas most impacted by the Cold War have ended up as protected nature preserves. A good example can be found in Germany where former Soviet military bases are being turned into grasslands. You can read all about it here, and, if you find the topic of interest, there are more articles listed at the end of the post.

The Lorax Attacks Corporate Greed and Excessive Consumerism

As more and more trees are cut down, it becomes obvious that the Once-ler only cares about making more and more Thneeds and more and more money, ignoring warnings about the devastation he’s causing. When confronted by the Lorax who now “speaks for the trees,” the Once-ler says:

“Look, Lorax,” I said. “There’s no cause for alarm.
I chopped just one tree. I am doing no harm.
I’m being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed.
A Theed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People Need!”

Well, one thing leads to another and soon the Once-ler’s Thneeds are jumping off the shelves. 

Confronting the Threat of Communism

The consumerist culture that the Lorax encounters reminds me of the rush to consumerism in the beginning years of the Cold War. The motivation is different though. The Once-ler just wants to make money but, in the early 1950s, some believed that the threat of communism could be countered with consumerism. The US pushed consumerism and manufacturing in order to flood European markets with American goods, aiming to combat communism with refrigerators and washing machines. 

Europeans weren’t the only consumers, however. Between 1945 and 1949, Americans purchased 20 million refrigerators, 21.4 million cars, and 5.5 million stoves, a trend that continued well into the 1950s, peaking in 1959 with a “Kitchen Debate” between Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev and the US Vice-President Richard Nixon.

Nixon took advantage of the debate opportunity to show off the standard of living available to ordinary Americans under capitalism. You can read more about it here and then watch the YouTube video below for a taste of the debate which took place at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959. The description for the YouTube video points out that “an entire house was built that the American exhibitors claimed anyone in America could afford. It was filled with labor-saving and recreational devices meant to represent the fruits of the capitalist American consumer market.”

Back to The Lorax

Getting back to The Lorax, just as Americans couldn’t buy consumer goods fast enough in the aftermath of World War II, the greedy Once-ler can’t keep up with the demand for Thneeds.

Now, chopping one tree at a time seems way too slow so he invents a Super-Axe-Hacker to speed things up, and soon he’s making Thneeds four times as fast as before. As production increases the air is filled with “smogulous smoke” and the pond is glumped “where the Humming-Fish Hummed.” When confronted with the damage he’s causing, the Once-ler makes clear again that he’s going to just keep on doing what he’s been doing. 

And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack!
From outside in the field came a sickening smack
of an ax on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.
The very last Truffula Tree of them all!

Past Choices Are Haunting Us

In today’s world the choices we made in the past are haunting us. Here are just a few examples from Robert J. Gordon’s 2016 book titled The Rise and Fall of American Growth (The US Standard of Living Since The Civil War) that show an impact on resource use in the United States. 

• Although the early postwar years reflected a decline in housing quality, gradually there was a turnaround, with an inexorable increase in the average square feet of space in the typical single-family housing unit.
• Suburbs were developed farther from the center city than in most developed nations. Superhighways were built not just to connect cities, but also to facilitate commuting within cities. . . . Except in the densest part of a few central cities, households were forced to use automobiles for shopping, commuting, and travel for all other reasons.
• Particularly after 1970, there was a complete transition from domestic to imported clothing together with a transition to “big-box” mass merchants such as Walmart that helped to achieve a sharp decline in the relative price of clothing. (Think “fast fashion” and its ramifications.)
• Food and food production were also affected as refrigerated transportation was common for meat, and prepared, processed, and frozen food became commonplace. 

Note: If you’d like more specifics about how building and transportation work together, check out this article in Treehugger.

It’s interesting to note that agriculture contributes to greenhouse gas emission and is negatively affected by  changes to the environment as well when conditions disrupt food availability, reduce access to food, and affect food quality. But that’s a story for another day.

I think it’s safe to say that many of us would like a redo. But since that’s not possible, maybe we should take to heart the message the Lorax passed on to the Once-ler by way of Dr. Seuss:

“But now, says the Once-ler,
“Now that you’re here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.

Plant a new Truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax
And all of his friends may come back.

_________________________________________________________

The Featured Photo is by Bryan Rosengrant. You can find his work on Flickr.

Here are some more articles related to the impact of the Cold War on the environment as well as post Cold War changes.

Other articles include a National Geographic article on Gunkanjima Island (also known as Hashima Island) near Nagasaki titled Abandoned ‘Battleship Island’ Is Crumbling. Can It Be Saved? The article starts by stating: “When humans left, nature prevailed. On Hashima Island, a 16-acre patch of land off the southern coast of Japan, grass and vines and flowers flourish as concrete and steel wither.”

Abandoned soviet military base. Laima Gutmane. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skrundas_armijas_pilsētiņa_-_an_abandoned_soviet_military_base_in_Skrunda_-_panoramio_(23).jpg

If you like pictures, you’ll want to take a look at CNN’s photo essay titled Wildlife is flourishing in these demilitarized zones.

An article in The Guardian tells How Wildlife is thriving in the Korean peninsula’s demilitarised zone, noting that “The forces that lock humans out of the DMZ have allowed other species to thrive . . .”

And, finally, the UN Environmental Program documents how “many people think the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant is a place of post-apocalyptic desolation. But more than 30 years after one of the facility’s reactors exploded, sparking the worst nuclear accident in human history, science tells us something very different. You can read the article here.

_________________

The Lorax is now a Disney Pixar movie

Still looking for Christmas presents? Maybe you can get some toy ideas for girls from the Cold War!

According to American Cold War ideology, homemakers in the United States were a bulwark against communism, fortifying the family social unit that was basic to a democratic society. In contrast, in the Soviet Union, communism drove women out of the home and put them to work, forcing children into state-run daycare centers and assaulting the family.

In response, postwar American society emphasized the importance of the “traditional” family structure which had a male wage-earner and a female housewife and mother. This placed the domesticated woman at the center of American values and viewed her domesticity as a weapon against any subversive communist influences. According to US Census data, in 1950, 23.8% of American married women had jobs outside the home; the figure climbed to 30.5% by 1960, and 39.6% by 1969.

An article in Life Magazine in 1953 tied working women to the consumer society, saying she worked “to increase her buying power as a consumer, for herself and particularly for her family.”

The bottom line was that, for most women, life was home centered. Women cared for their homes and for the emotional and nutritional needs of their families. They nursed, cooked, cleaned, decorated, and shopped. Girls and their toys mimicked the activities of their mothers.

Women’s housekeeping tasks were faithfully reproduced by their daughters who played with their own child-sized sweepers, vacuums, and pots and pans, Some of these were made by the same companies who manufactured the working appliances their moms used. Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company sold versions for real use and also the “Little Queen Carpet Sweeper” for girls, a good way to instill brand name loyalty at an early age.

Vintage Little Queen Carpet Sweeper on Etsy

The Kenner “Easy Bake” and Deluxe Topper Corporation’s “Suzy Homemaker” toy ovens were also popular. They used a light bulb as a heat source that could bake real, but tiny, cakes. Packaged cake mixes from Betty Crocker were sold especially for this use. The Easy Bake slogan promised little girls that they could make “Food as Good as Mom’s.”

“SH-collection BradRoss” by Bradross63 (talk) (Uploads) – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikipedia

Lessons in gender roles were seamlessly linked to lessons in the growing consumer economy. In the early 1950s, Americans began to spend more of their disposable income on food, not because of a rise in food prices, but because of marketing of new kinds of convenience foods. Toys reinforced the message that most food could be found packaged and processed.

Betty Crocker play cake mix from the 1950s.

The most important girl’s toy to come out of the Cold War era was the “Barbie” doll, introduced by Mattel in 1959. Barbie was sold as a fashion doll and ads promised:

Girls of all ages will thrill to the fascination of her miniature wardrobe of fine-fabric fashions . . . . Feminine magic! A veritable fashion show, and every girl can be the star!

Barbie didn’t cost very much when she was first introduced — only about $3 — but her clothes and accessory add-ons earned Mattel very healthy profits.

Barbie provided a contrast to then popular board games because some of the board games actually allowed for the possibility that women might be more than just a fashion object. She might, in fact, work outside the home, but only within a very narrow spectrum of possibilities.

The Selchow and Righter Company made a board game called What Shall I Be in two versions, one for boys and one for girls. Interestingly, there was no overlap between the careers offered to each. Girls choices in the 1966 version included the “helping” professions, like teacher or nurse, with some very glamorous options like stewardess, ballerina, actress, and model. In the 1968 version, boys could try out becoming doctors, engineers, astronauts, scientists, athletes, and statesmen. Neither of the options touched on the majority of real women’s jobs, the “pink collar ghetto” of secretaries, clerks, and waitresses.

Selchow and Righter Board Game for Girls

Selchow and Righter Board Game for Boys

It’s interesting to note that, according to a recent article in The Atlantic, the marketing of toys is more gendered today than it was 50 years ago when gender discrimination and sexism were the norm. But that’s another story.

Cover photograph by James Vaughan (Flickr).

Would you rather read a comic book or a 500 page biography?

In 1948, President Truman’s campaign answered that question with a 16 page comic book published by the Democratic National Committee.

By this time, President Truman was used to the snickering of political cartoonists. They’d made fun of his stance on many controversial issues: the desegregation of the armed forces; his decision to drop the atomic bomb;  and the Republican takeover of Congress (called the Do Nothing Congress by Truman). Now that he was in the middle of the 1948 presidential campaign, political and editorial cartoons were everywhere.

Actually Truman sort of liked them. We know this because, after he left office, he became an avid collector. And, while in office — as we have seen — he used them to his advantage. 

Benjamin Franklin: Join, or Die?

Political and editorial cartoons have long been part of propaganda campaigns.  They trace their origins in the US to Benjamin Franklin and his cartoon Join, or Die (1754). The cartoon depicts the disunity of the Thirteen Colonies during the French and Indian War. It became even more famous later on when it was used to encourage the former colonies to unite during the American Revolution. 

Political cartoons were in and out of favor during the early 19th century, but in the 1880s, the media became popular again.

The 1948 Democratic National Convention

Some say the 1948 presidential campaign of Harry Truman is one of the greatest political campaigns in the modern era. No one gave him a chance of beating the Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey of New York. The Southern Democrats, called Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, and the Progressives, led by Henry Wallace, had both splintered from the Democratic party. In fact, Hubert Humphrey’s civil rights speech at the convention provoked a walk out.

Nevertheless, the convention re-nominated Truman and adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals.

Thirty-five southern delegates walked out of the convention. The move was on to remove Truman’s name from the ballot in the southern United States. The problem of course: Truman’s support for a stronger civil rights platform than they found acceptable.

The Democratic party lost faith, and refused to spend their usual large sums of money on the election. Truman’s prospects for victory were dim.

The 1948 Presidential Election

On election day, Truman went to bed at 6:30. He woke up about midnight just in time to hear NBC announce:

While the President is a million votes ahead of the popular vote, when the country vote comes in Mr. Truman will be defeated by an overwhelming majority.

Truman concluded:

. . . to the sorrow of myself, and to those who were listening with me, it looked very much as if the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives because, of course, it was not possible for me to get a majority of the electoral votes. I went back to bed, and went to sleep.

About 4 AM Truman woke up again.  This time he heard the NBC announcer proclaim:

While the President has a lead of two million votes, it is certainly necessary that this election shall go into the House of Representative. He hasn’t an opportunity of being elected by a majority of the electoral votes of the Nation!

Truman called the Secret Service in and said:

We’d better go back to Kansas City, it looks as if I’m elected!

The Media Had It Wrong

As it turns out, Truman was right. He carried 24,105,812 popular votes to Dewey’s 21,970,065. This translated into his winning 28 states and 303 electoral votes. Dewey ended up with 189 electoral votes from 16 states.

Not surprisingly, the cartoonists had been having a field day.

__________________________________________________________________________

Sources:

Harry S. Truman Library and Museum

Truman Comic Book: The Story of Harry S. Truman
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/story-harry-s-truman?documentid=NA&pagenumber=1

Truman Cartoons in the Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/collections/cartoon-drawings/?fa=subject:truman,+harry+s.

Join, or Die (1754)
By Benjamin Franklin – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress;Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g05315. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10604794

It’s hard to believe that we still have one more primary to go before the 2020 Democratic Convention the week of August 17. 

The Connecticut primary, originally scheduled for April 28, will now be held on August 11. Although 60 delegates are at stake, the contest is anticlimactic. The Connecticut vote will not be a game changer since one candidate — Joe Biden — has already wrapped up the Democratic nomination.

Actually, the disorder so far this year has been relatively minor when compared to that of the 1968 election season. Importantly, this was the last year that it was possible for a candidate to run for the American presidency without participating in a single primary.

In a previous post titled Election 2020: Is American Democracy in Danger, I discussed some findings from the 2018 book titled How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Both authors are professors of  government at Harvard University. You might want to take a look at the 10 takeaways in that post for a little more insight.

Gatekeeping and Populist Outsiders

As it turns out, US primary elections once served a “gatekeeping” function, filtering out politicians who rejected in words or actions “the democratic rules of the game.” Very often these rules are discounted by populist outsiders who want to gain power by claiming that they represent the voice of the people. They tell people that the existing system is not really democratic, that it’s been hijacked, corrupted, or rigged by the elite — meaning the establishment. Then they promise to “drain the swamp” and return power to the people. 

In Latin America between 1990 and 2012, five presidents were populist outsiders: Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Lucio Gutierrez, and Rafael Correa. All five ended up weakening democratic institutions, and the world is still living with how that turned out.

According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, the responsibility for filtering out individuals with authoritarian leanings rests with political parties and party leaders. In other words, these are democracy’s gatekeepers, those tasked with keeping authoritarians off party ballots at election time.

For most of America’s past, these party gatekeepers kept so-called unconventional candidates off the ballot. But a turning point came in 1968. 

A Turning Point

1968 was a turbulent year in the United States. You can read more about it in our post on Protest and Resistance: The Lead Up to the 1968 Election. 

In short, in the months leading up to the presidential elections that year President Lyndon Johnson had escalated the war in Vietnam, and the conflict was spiraling out of control. 

April 1968 saw the assassination of America’s revered civil rights leader, Martin Luther King.  

A second tragedy occurred in June, when Bobby Kennedy was shot just hours after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary. He was pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. PDT on June 6, about 26 hours after he had been shot.

Democrats Are Divided

Kennedy’s passing left the Democrats divided. Some supported Johnson’s foreign policy while others were in favor of Kennedy’s antiwar position. The traditional party organization stepped in to resolve the conflict, but unity was hard to come by.

Party insiders threw their weight behind the current vice president, Hubert Humphrey. But he was unpopular because of his association with Johnson, and because he hadn’t run in a single primary. Still, with the backing of “party leaders, union bosses, and other insiders,” he won his party’s nomination on the first ballot. Chaos ensued.

Protests and Party Insiders

On August 28, protesters marched on the convention. 

“Confrontations exploded on the convention floor,” and “uniformed police officers dragged several delegates from the auditorium.”

 In the end, Humphrey’s candidacy marked the end of the “party-insider” selection system. In the wake of the Chicago convention, there was far reaching reform that affected both political parties.

After Humphrey’s defeat in the 1968 election, the Democratic Party created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to rethink the nomination system.

That commission came up with a system revolving around binding presidential primaries. Beginning in 1972, most delegates to both the Democratic and Republican conventions would be elected in state-level primaries and caucuses.

Delegates would be preselected by the candidates themselves to ensure their loyalty. There would be no more party leaders upsetting the apple cart by making backroom deals. The traditional party gatekeepers could now be circumvented.

The Democrats changed this a little bit in the early 1980s when they stipulated that a share of their national delegates would be comprised of elected officials who would be appointed by state parties rather than elected in primaries. These superdelegates were to represent between 15 and 20 percent of national delegates, serving to counterbalance primary voters who might settle on candidates that governors, big city mayors, senators and congressional representatives disapproved of.

The GOP, on the other hand, saw no need for superdelegates, opting to maintain a more democratic nomination system.

Outsider Candidates

By placing presidential nominations in the hands of voters, the gatekeeping function of the party elite was weakened, potentially opening the door to outsider candidates. 

• In the 23 years between 1945 and 1968, under the old system, only one outsider — Dwight Eisenhower — publicly sought the nomination of either party. 
• In contrast, during the first two decades of the new primary system, 1972-1992, eight outsiders ran, five Democrats and three Republicans. 
• Between 1996 and 2016, eighteen outsiders competed. Thirteen of these were Republicans. 

Until 2016, celebrity outsiders had always fallen short. 

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party nomination in 1984 and 1988, while Southern Baptist leader Pat Robertson (1988), television commentator Pat Buchanan (1992, 1996, 2000), and Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes (1996) ran for the Republican nomination. But they all lost.

Even after the 1968 changes, it proved difficult to circumvent the party establishment.

The Invisible Primary

Capturing a majority of delegates required winning primaries all over the county, which, in turn, required money, favorable media coverage, and, crucially, people working on the ground in all states. Any candidate seeking to complete the grueling obstacle course of U.S. primaries needed allies among donors, newspaper editors, interest groups, and state-level politicians . . . 

Arthur T. Hadley wrote about this in his 1976 book, The Invisible Primary. He claimed that this phase

which occurred before the primary season even began was ‘where the winning candidate is actually selected.’ Members of the party establishment — elected officials, activists, allied interest groups — were, thereby, not necessarily locked out of the game. Without them . . . it was nearly impossible to win either party’s nomination.

Nearly impossible, maybe, but not entirely.

Enter Donald Trump.

The post 1968 primary system had left Republican leaders without an absolute way to stop Trump’s rise. After 1968, they no longer held all the keys to their party’s presidential nomination.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Much of the information is this post is sourced from Chapter 2 of the 2018 book titled How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. It’s well worth a read.

Photo by kalihikahuna74 (OkinawaKhan808).  RIchard “Tricky D#%k” Nixon (Republican), Hubert Humphrey (Democrat), & George Wallace (Courage)

Background

Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 -1964, was responsible for the launching of a bold political offensive against the West in the Third World.

At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet foreign policy had run out of steam. Instead of applying pressure, the Eisenhower administration extended an olive branch, expressing interest in solving lingering problems, especially the Korean conflict. The Kremlin seemed receptive to the opportunity and an armistice was reached in Korea in June 1953.

The Khrushchev Years

Shortly after, in July 1953, the Soviets announced a 4-million-ruble contribution to the United Nations program of technical assistance to the underdeveloped nations.

In September 1953, the Soviet government signed a 5 year trade agreement with India.

In 1954, Afghanistan became the first Third World nation to receive Soviet credits since World War II.

In 1954 also, in a major initiative toward the Arab world, the Soviet Union cast vetoes in the UN Security Council protecting the Arab position on several issues. One veto blocked a Western resolution on the division of Jordan River waters. Another blocked a New Zealand resolution that would have reaffirmed the 1951 condemnation of Egypt’s denial to Israel of access to the Suez Canal.

In February 1955, The Soviets and India announced a million-ton steel mill project at Bhilai. The Soviets gave a $100 million credit to India for this project.

In April 1955, a conference of nonaligned states was held in Bandung, Indonesia. The Soviets recognized the conference, and wrangled an invitation for their Chinese allies, thus undermining rigid adherence to Zdanov’s “two camp” strategy. Now, the nonaligned nations mattered.

In June 1955, India’s prime minister Nehru paid a visit to the Soviet Union.

In November and December of that same year, the Soviet’s new Premier, Nikolai Bulganin, and Party First Secretary Khrushchev visited India, Burma, and Afghanistan. The India trip was the first of Khruschev’s many Third World encounters.

The visit to India was the highlight of the officials’ month long journey. While there, the Soviets promised support for the Indian position on the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan and the Goa dispute with Portugal, scoring points at the expense of the British, the Americans, and the Chinese.

Later that same year, on September 27, the Soviets chalked up another success when Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, announced that his country would be purchasing advanced weapons from Czechoslovakia. Although Czechoslovakia was the supplier of record, Nasser soon admitted that the deal had been negotiated with the Soviets. The $200-$250 million barter deal (some say as high as $400 million) included Soviet MIG-15 and MIG-17 jet fighters in exchange for Egyptian rice and cotton.

The Soviets had moved from ceremonial visits, trade deals, and steel mills to massive arms supply in a region of vital strategic importance to the West. 

In these early years, the Soviet advantage seemed overwhelming. Khrushchev went so far as to declare that the new nations born of the breakup of the colonial empires were “natural partners of the socialist countries in a vast zone of peace . . . .”

Still, many of the emerging nations valued their independence, and only a handful — North Korea, Cuba, North Vietnam — declared themselves fully “Marxist-Leninist.”  Nevertheless, it would take the West 30 years to make significant headway.

The Eisenhower Years

In March 1956, on the heels of the Soviet tour of India, John Foster Dulles (the US Secretary of State) paid a visit to New Delhi. Since 1951, the United States had been shipping huge quantities of emergency wheat and rice to India to relieve famine.

According to Peter W. Rodman, in his book More Precious Than Peace:

From 1945 to 1956, U.S. economic aid delivered to India, including both loans and grants, totaled nearly $435 million. (Soviet aid delivered through 1956 totaled some $40 million, though over $300 million was pledged.) U.S. aid was predominantly in the form of grants; Soviet aid was then entirely credits. Yet when Dulles arrived at Palam Airport, Nehru was not there to greet him, on the grounds that he (Nehru) was not only foreign minister but also head of government and therefore their ranks were not equal.

Not surprisingly, Americans were quite sensitive about the treatment. It raised a number of questions about American’s role and prospects in the new nations.

President Eisenhower and his secretary of state acknowledged that the Soviets presented strategic challenges, and they devoted a great deal of diplomatic effort to constructing alliances to block Soviet expansion. “Pactomania” as it was called was a worldwide attempt to counter the Soviets.

In Latin America, the US reinforced the Rio Pact of 1948; in Southeast Asia, there was the Manila Pact of 1954; in the Western Pacific, there were mutual defense treaties in 1954 with the Republic of Korea and the Republic of China; in the Near East there was the Baghdad Pact of 1955; and in Japan, there was a security treaty in 1960.

Covert action was also on the table: the Eisenhower administration used CIA action in Iran in 1953 to remove Prime Minister Mosaddeq from office; there was action in Guatemala in 1954; and most embarrassingly, an American U-2 was shot down in May 1960 in a reconnaissance overflight of the Soviet Union.

Despite all the above activity, the administration was concerned about the monetary costs of opposing Soviet expansionism over a long period of time, fearing that it might pose an economic threat to the American way of life.

America’s leaders understood that they needed to have a positive program to respond to Soviet activities in the Third World. They wanted to distance the US from the colonial legacy and respond to the aspirations of the new nations for economic advance, social progress, and political independence. Soon the nation was engaged in a prolonged national debate over the purposes of foreign aid. As with many Cold War policy disagreements, this debate is continuing as we move into the 2020 election year.

Conversation Starters: Here are a couple of questions to consider. Feel free to add your opinion in the comments.

What do you think about “pactomania?” Are the agreements the United States signed during the Cold War still important today? 

How important is America’s leadership on the world stage?

Source: Peter Rodman, More Precious Than Peace (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994) pp.52-61. Please note that this is an affiliate link.

More Information:

The United States Overthrew Iran’s Last Democratic Leader

Soon after World War II ended, American and Russia took center stage in world affairs. Both of them declared war on the colonial system, and soon the Third World was caught up in a new ideological struggle.

The Third World was to be torn apart by its own dogmatic civil wars, mirroring the contest of the superpowers. As Peter W. Rodman notes in his book More Precious Than Peace:

Third World societies would often find themselves split between moderates and radicals, between the middle- or upper-class elites whose dream was to be part of the civilized world (the Habib Bourguibas and Leopold Senghors) and the revolutionaries who saw the Western-dominated ‘civilized world’ as still the main enemy (the Ho Chi Minhs and Fidel Castros).

Each superpower looked for clients and proxies among the developing nations as well as within them.

A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment in September 1948 expressed great concern:

. . . The USSR is effectively exploiting the colonial issue and the economic nationalism of the underdeveloped areas as a means of dividing the non-Soviet world, weakening the Western Powers, and gaining the good will of colonial and former colonial areas.

Stalin’s behavior in Europe only reinforced the fears. He was gradually absorbing Eastern Europe, violating wartime accords.

In Western Europe, the weakness of postwar democracies heightened America’s anxiety that the Communist parties would dominate the Western half of the continent as well.

The US President, Harry S. Truman, perceived that “America had no choice but to step in with an extensive program of economic and military assistance. On March 12,1947, he spoke before a joint session of commerce stating:

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.

Arguably, Truman’s statement applied globally, not just to southeastern Europe. Precedent was set when two months later (in May) Congress voted on an aid program for Greece and Turkey.

In June 1947, the Marshall Plan was announced in Secretary of State George Marshall’s commencement speech at Harvard. This was seen as a response to the advances of Communist parties and communist-led labor organizations in Western Europe.  Congress passed an initial appropriation in December 1947.

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were the Truman Administration’s efforts to contain the Soviet threat, reinforcing the belief that economic hardship would not provide a fertile environment for rebuilding the political and economic institutions damaged during the war.

Two years later, in April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington. This was seen as the West’s response to Stalin’s brutal suppression of Eastern Europe, especially the Czechoslovakia coup of 1948. The stability and recovery of Western Europe now required American’s participation in European Defense. Financial aid was not going to be enough.

Stalin’s pressure on Europe had provoked American intervention. The danger of political collapse in Western Europe was real, and the increasing brutality of Stalin’s actions in Eastern and Central Europe heightened the growing sense of danger.

Outside of Europe, the situation was a bit murkier. Truman had articulated a doctrine that could draw us into engagements all over the world. Meanwhile, Stalin’s policy was unclear.

At the first Cominform conference in September 1947, Stalin’s politburo colleague Andrei Zdanov argued that the world was now divided into two camps, an “imperialist and anti-democratic camp” and an “anti-imperialist and democratic camp.”

So far as the Soviets were concerned, the United States and its allies formed the core of the ‘imperialist camp’, while the Soviets made up the ‘anti-imperialist camp’. Some individual countries (Egypt, India, Indonesia, Vietnam) were sympathetic to the Soviets, while most nations in the Near East and Latin America were relegated to the imperialists.

According to Stalin, only the Communist parties were reliable champions of national liberation. Nationalists were not to be trusted and the idea that states could be neutral, or a “third force” between the two sides was “a rotten idea . . . that only served the interests of imperialism.”

1949 brought two game changers. First, the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb in August. Then, the Communists achieved victory in China in October.  These events were followed by Communist North Korea’s surprise invasion of South Korea in June 1950.

The Truman Administration decided that it would be dangerous to allow the Soviets to commit aggression in the Third World. There was now a new geopolitical reality, and a US policy fixated on Europe was no longer deemed adequate.

According to Rodman:

the  military buildup that the United States undertook after the North Korean attack was the most decisive step in its emergence as a global military power.

In April 1950, Truman and his National Security Council had approved NSC 68 which expressed alarm at recent Soviet advances — Europe, the bomb, China. A follow-up report, NSC 73/4 in August 1950 warned:

 . . . the invasion of South Korea ‘should be regarded not as an isolated phenomenon but possibly as part of a general plan which might involve correlated action in other parts of the world.

Korea provoked a response. America committed to a global role, including outside of Europe.

Total defense spending more than tripled in the first year of the Korean War.

The Cold War in the Third World had begun.

Conversation Starters: Here are a couple of questions to consider. Feel free to add your opinion in the comments.

How important are America’s alliances — are they still relevant in our world today?

Was it important for America to project military power around the world? Is it still important today?

Source: Peter Rodman, More Precious Than Peace (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994) pp.43-51. Please note that this is an affiliate link.

More Information: For more information on the early Cold War, be sure to listen to our podcasts.

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan

NSC 68

Photograph by Juandev 

LISTEN TO OUR NEW PODCAST: THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND THE MARSHALL PLAN (TWO HALVES OF THE SAME WALNUT)

Cold War Studies is excited to bring you our most recent podcast, the third in a series based on AMERICA, RUSSIA, AND THE COLD WAR  by Walter LaFeber. The podcast begins on March 12, 1947, when US President Harry Truman finally issues his own Declaration of Cold War. It ends with the implementation of the Marshall Plan and European calls for the protection of a US dominated military alliance.

Timeline

February 21, 1947: The British notify the US that, because of their own economic crisis, they cannot provide the military and economic support needed by Greece and Turkey.

March 12, 1947: President Truman issues his own declaration of cold war, the Truman Doctrine. He asks Americans to join in a global commitment against communism. This doctrine becomes the guiding spirit of America’s post World War 2 foreign policy. The speech requests $400 million in Greek and Turkish aid.

July 1947: A “long telegram” written by George Kennan (Mr. X) explains Soviet behavior. Mr. X argues that Soviet aggression will need to be contained.

July 1947: Truman pushes the National Security Act through Congress, providing for a single Department of Defense to replace three independently run services. It establishes a Joint Chiefs of Staff, a National Security Council to advise the President, and a Central Intelligence Agency to correlate and evaluate intelligence activities.

July 1947: The Russians begin to concentrate on Germany. Rebuilding Europe threatened Stalin. A series of moves tightens Soviet control of the Eastern bloc. A program of bilateral trade agreements (Molotov Plan) begins to link the bloc countries and Russia.

Late Summer 1947: American nations convene in Rio de Janeiro to initiate steps toward a collective security arrangement.

September 2, 1947: The US and Latin America sign the Rio Treaty whereby an attack against one American nation will be considered an attack against all.

Late 1947: American officials perceive that the “one world” of the UN is no longer valid, and economic development cannot occur until security is established. There is increasing concern with things military.

1947-1948: The quest for military security transforms US policy in Asia. The State Department reverses its post 1945 policy and decides to rebuild Japanese industry and develop a sound export economy. At the same time, American military bases on the island will be expanded and maintained.

March 1948: The Ninth Inter-American Conference convenes in Bogota, Columbia. Out of this meeting comes the Charter of the Organization of American States which establishes administrative machinery for hemispheric consultation and an Advisory Defense Committee for military strategy. The charter is ratified by the US Senate.

April 3, 1948: The Foreign Assistance Plan (known as the Marshall Plan), concentrating efforts on Europe, becomes effective. The plan revolves around establishing a rebuilt and autonomous Germany. It also offers large sums to nations like France. The plan marks the last phase in the administration’s use of economic tactics as a primary means of tying together the Western World.

January 1949: COMECON (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) is established. This is the Soviet response to the Marshall Plan, a centralized agency for stimulating and controlling bloc development. Also, the Cominform, the Communist Information Bureau, is formed as an instrument for increasing Stalin’s control.

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A PDF of the podcast is provided. You can access the text of  THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE AND THE MARSHALL PLAN (TWO HALVES OF THE SAME WALNUT) here.

There is also a downloadable Glossary of Terms.

Here are the links to the first two podcasts:

CAUSES OF THE COLD WAR

MORE CAUSES OF THE COLD WAR

Photograph By Υπουργείο Εξωτερικών – Φωτογραφική έκθεση υπηρεσίας Διπλωματικού και Ιστορικού Αρχείου. Photo exhibition of the Diplomatic and Historical Archive Department, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26282553

Under Herbert Hoover, America’s president from 1929-1933, the U.S. was converted to the view that intervention in other nation’s affairs was no longer respectable. He said:

True democracy is not and cannot be imperialistic.

However, a decisive shift in American colonial policy came with his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In a 1928 article in Foreign Affairs (the year Hoover was elected president), Roosevelt deplored U.S. intervention in Latin America, whether by Republican or Democratic administrations. He thought that the ill will garnered by interventionism would ultimately harm our trading relations. Consequently, in his own first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt announced his Good Neighbor Policy.

In 1933 and 1934, Roosevelt refused to get involved in a civil war in Cuba. He also completed the withdrawal of the marines from Haiti. Outside of Latin America, he promoted and signed legislation setting a date for Philippine independence, and he authorized the State Department to negotiate with China on terminating American extraterritorial rights.

The Atlantic Charter (which Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signed in August 1941) included a joint renunciation of ambitions for acquiring territory. Soon, however, the language of the charter was in dispute with Churchill arguing that the language applied only to liberated Europe. Roosevelt, on the other hand, made a special point of repeatedly urging Churchill to speed independence for India.

American militancy on the subject of colonialism had many sources.

One argument was economic, with Roosevelt, an outspoken free trader, objecting to colonialism as a form of protectionism. There was no way that colonialism would fit into a postwar world that was to be governed by the Open Door.

Also, Roosevelt believed that the competition among colonial powers for raw materials and markets impoverished local peoples and was a dangerous source of war. He commented:

The thing is the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements — all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war . . . .

Third, American leaders were convinced that the colonial peoples’ liberation was inevitable and they thought it was essential for the West not to be the target of their antagonism. Roosevelt explained:

. . . there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many Eastern countries, they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence — 1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous. (He included 450,000,000 Chinese in this number.)

Roosevelt then added, “Curchill doesn’t understand this.”

A fourth source of anticolonialist passion in American policy was the American vision of postwar world alignments. According to Peter Rodman in his book, More Precious Than Peace:

It was the vision of a world in which Britain’s and France’s struggle to recover their empires would be a bigger problem for U.S. foreign policy than Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Fifth, and perhaps most important, was the powerful anticolonialist feeling of the American public. Added to this was Roosevelt’s perception that what he knew and saw of colonialism was exploitation and, therefore, the sooner it ended, the better.

Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, didn’t share the anticolonialist passion to the same degree. Moreover, any continuity with Roosevelt’s policy was shattered when the Cold War disrupted any remaining illusions of postwar international harmony. Soon, the Soviet challenge would come to dominate.

For more information on colonization read the Cold War Studies post on the History of Colonization in the Middle East and North Africa.

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Good Neighbor Policy

Atlantic Charter

Open Door Policy

Featured Photo: Unknown

Map: Aris Katsaris