It’s the first week in October and everyone seems to be talking about an October Surprise.

Will Russia use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine?

Will Trump’s ongoing legal issues come to a head before the midterm elections? Will he be indicted or will he announce that he is running for president in 2024?

Will Herschel Walker lose the Senate because some untoward issues in his past have been exposed?

Perhaps it’s time for a look back. What actually is an October Surprise and does it matter in the context of today’s polarized political environment?

October Surprise: A Few FAQ’s

In its History of the October Surprise, Rutgers University says:

Now the term refers to any late-breaking major news that upends the presidential election.

Robert Singh, a professor in the Department of Politics at Berkbeck, University of London, expands this explanation noting:

The phenomenon tends more to be associated with presidential elections than congressional [elections or] midterms. It’s more effective in the former where attention is focused on the two candidates for the White House.

With so many congressional races, and two-thirds of the Senate not up for election, it’s more difficult to shape the race across so many districts and states.

Still, given today’s 24 hour news cycle, with the midterms just five weeks away, the term is being applied to the 2022 midterms, and is being bandied about endlessly.

An October Surprise is All About Politics

You may be interested to know that according to Merriam-Webster, “October Surprise” wasn’t initially political. Instead, it referred to autumn’s department store clothing sales.

The term October Surprise took on a political meaning when it was introduced in 1980 by William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager. Reagan was running for President against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, who had been trying for some time to get the Iranian hostages released. After all, it had been just about a year since militant students stormed the US embassy in Tehran, taking more than 52 Americans captive. The October Surprise referred to the possibility that Carter would have last-minute success in getting them out before the election.

The nature of an October Surprise means that it can’t be predicted, but  according to Politico Magazine it can be deliberately orchestrated. They say:

An “October surprise” can be happenstance or deliberately orchestrated; international (e.g. the outbreak of war) or domestic (e.g. a massive economic rally). Sometimes it’s personal, with a long-hidden skeleton spilling out from a candidate’s closet. It can save a political campaign as quickly as it can wreck one. And occasionally, it can even decide an election and set the course of the nation.

Just think about the movie Wag the Dog* or the brouhaha around Herschel Walker in this morning’s news. And just to be clear, there were election upending events even before the political application of the term came into common usage.  Today, though, I’m just going to concentrate on some Cold War examples, starting first with the Carter-Reagan Example.

*(Although not about an October Surprise, Wag the Dog tells the story of a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer who fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal.)

Carter, Reagan, and the Iranian Hostages

I mentioned earlier that the Reagan camp was worried that Jimmy Carter would come up with a last minute way to free the Iranian hostages just in time to ensure his win in the 1980 presidential contest. He had even approved a rescue attempt in April, but it had been a failure. (If you’d like a refresher, you can read about it on the Carter Library website.)

Carter was not successful in negotiating the release of the hostages, but later there were accusations that Reagan’s campaign conspired with the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. They were finally set free just minutes after Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s 40th president. The hostages had been held for 444 days. Although never proven,  Wikipedia asserts:

Several individuals—most notably, former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr, former naval intelligence officer and U.S. National Security Council member Gary Sick, and Barbara Honegger, a former campaign staffer and White House analyst for Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush—have stood by the allegation.

As you might imagine, this is quite an intriguing controversy to research. If you’re at all interested, you will want to watch the HBO four-part series Hostages. It’s brand new and full of ‘never before seen’ footage.

The October Surprise in Cold War Elections

Here are some more surprises pulled from a variety of sources.

1956: Eisenhower vs Stevenson

In the presidential election of 1956, global affairs were influential. The Hungarian uprising on October 23, and the Suez Crisis beginning on October 29, helped bolster Eisenhower’s stature in the White House. He won by a landslide — he was going to win regardless — but the happenings underscored the importance of elections in a globalized world.

1964: Johnson vs Goldwater

1964 brought, first, a sex scandal, and, later, international intrigue to the fore. President Johnson’s top aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for disorderly conduct at a homosexual gathering place, and the story was immediately leaked. LBJ escaped the consequence because a week later Premier Nikita Kruschev was ousted from power in the USSR. In the days that followed, China conducted its first nuclear weapons test. Goldwater’s inflationary rhetoric turned off voters and Johnson won in a landslide.

1968: Nixon vs Humphrey

In 1968, Richard Nixon managed to derail LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks. William Casey (remember him?) was suspicious that President Johnson would engineer a last-minute peace deal in Vietnam to help his fellow Democrat, Hubert Humphrey. In fact, the speculation was correct. On October 31, Johnson announced a halt to bombing and the start of new peace talks between Saigon and the Viet Cong. Humphrey rose in the polls.

Nixon responded by reaching out to South Vietnam’s president through backchannels, encouraging him not to attend peace talks and promising strong support from his administration if he won.

Three days before the election the South Vietnamese withdrew from the peace talks, and Humphrey’s support plummeted. Nixon won the election, but LBJ’s maneuvering narrowed his margin of victory.

1972: Nixon vs McGovern

Despite Nixon’s 1968 campaign promise to end the Vietnam War, as the end of his first term was nearing, the conflict was still raging. On October 8, North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris suddenly agreed to US conditions for peace. Henry Kissinger famously declared that “peace is at hand.” His optimism was misplaced as the war wouldn’t come to a close for two more years. But the statement distracted the public from Nixon’s Watergate scandal. Nixon won the election with more than 60% of the popular vote.

1992: George H.W. Bush vs Clinton

Politico writes:

The Iran-Contra Affair, when the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the money to fund an anti-communist militia in Nicaragua, came to light in 1987, but by the fall of 1992, it was still fresh enough to cause electoral trouble for Republicans.

(For more on the Iran Contra affair, read the Cold War Studies post Cold War: The Iran-Iraq War and the Contra Affair.)

Just days before the election, independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh indicted former Reagan Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger for lying about his involvement in the affair. Walsh was a Republican, but even so, Republicans accused him of timing the indictment to damage President Bush. Bush lost the election to Clinton, but pardoned Weinberger in his final days in office.

2000: Bush vs Gore

Days before the election, in a November surprise, FOX News reported that Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976.  Years later, Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote that he believes the scandal cost Bush five states. It really doesn’t matter. The Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency in December after a controversial Florida recount.

2004: Bush vs Kerry

On October 27, Al Jazeera aired video of Osama bin Laden claiming responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and calling President Bush a dictator who repressed freedom through the Patriot Act. The media speculated that the tape was released to influence the election. The move bolstered Bush’s reputation as an enemy of terrorism and gave him a six point lead in the polls going into the election.

2008: Obama vs McCain

Toward the end of the campaign, the Associated Press reported that Barack Obama’s half-aunt Seituni Onyango had lived illegally in Boston for years after the Department of Homeland Security ordered her to leave in country in 2004. Did this cause Obama’s drop in the polls? Perhaps, but it doesn’t matter, because Obama won the election with 52.9 % of the popular vote and 365 electoral college votes.

2012: Obama vs Romney

Hurricane Sandy has been called an October Surprise, but some say it fails to qualify because it was not a human-caused event. You can decide for yourself if that’s disqualifying. But some say the real surprise that year was the September release of a secretly recorded tape of Mitt Romney belittling nearly half of all Americans at a fund raising event. He’s quoted as saying:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him [Obama], who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has responsibility to care for them.

President Obama quipped in reply:

My expectation is that if you want to be president, you’ve got to work for everybody, not just for some.

Add in the dog story, and you know what happened. Don’t remember the dog story?

During a 1983 family vacation, Mitt Romney drove 12 hours with his dog on top of the car in a windshield-equipped carrier. This incident was first reported during the 2008 presidential election and became the subject of negative media attention and political attacks on Romney again in 2012. Needless to say, his attempt to capture the high office was unsuccessful.

2016: Trump vs Hillary Clinton

In 2016, both the videotape of Trump and his treatment of women, and FBI Director James Comey’s decision to take another look at Hillary Clinton’s emails were labeled October Surprises. Only the email issue seemed to influence the election. After Comey’s announcement, Hillary’s lead over Trump narrowed, and he was able to overtake her to win the presidency.

The October Surprise in Today’s World

Well, what do you think? Can you imagine an October Surprise that would make a difference? Some say that the political environment has changed so much that an October Surprise centered on a candidate would have little impact. We’ve become so polarized that people vote for a party not a person. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just leave a comment below.

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Featured photograph by Brian Crawford on Flickr.

Everyone loves a parade, especially a holiday parade! That’s why nothing — not even the Cold War — could dampen the excitement surrounding New York City’s famous Thanksgiving Day Parade. Sponsored by Macy’s Department Store, it’s been a major New York City event for almost 100 years!

A Brief History

The Macy’s Christmas Parade kicked off in 1924, covering a six mile route beginning at 145th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem and ending at Macy’s Department Store on Herald Square — Broadway and 34th Street. According to one report, The New York Times wrote:

the majority of participants were employees of the stores. There were, however, many professional entertainers who kept the spectators amused as they passed by. Beautiful floats showed the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe, Little Miss Muffet, and Red Riding Hood. There were also bears, elephants, donkeys and bands, making the procession resemble a circus parade. (The animals came from the Central Park Zoo.)

All along the route, according to the Times, the parade “was welcomed by such crowds that a large force of policemen had its hands full maintaining the police lines.” Some 10,000 people watched Santa — who rode on a float designed to look like a sled being pulled by reindeer — be crowned King of the Kiddies, then enjoyed the unveiling of the store’s Christmas windows.

The parade was such a success that Macy’s decided to make it an annual event, renaming it the Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1927. That same year, the live animals were replaced by animal shaped balloons made by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio. Felix the Cat was the first balloon animal to join the parade, but he was soon accompanied by a flying dragon, an elephant, and a toy soldier.

The parade continued to delight throughout the Great Depression, but was suspended from 1942 to 1944 when both helium and rubber were needed for the World War II defense effort. Macy’s deflated its rubber balloons — which weighed 650 pounds total—and donated them to the government.

Returning to The Big Apple in 1945 with two million spectators looking on, the parade was as marvelous as ever. In 1946, though, as the Cold War was in its earliest stages, organizers changed course. Marchers were directed to follow a new route, starting at 77th Street and Central Park West and ending at 34th Street — half the parade’s previous path.

The Cold War Years

1946: The parade appears on local NYC TV channels for the first time.

1947: The parade is broadcast to a national audience on NBC, the same network that broadcasts it today. Footage from the 1946 parade is featured in the movie Miracle on 34th Street.

1952: A space man balloon is introduced.

1957: An already drenched crowd, watching the parade in inclement weather, gets even wetter when Popeye the Sailor’s hat fills with water and dumps gallons onto nearby spectators. The balloon’s hat is remade to prevent a repeat occurrence, but the same thing happens five years later when rainwater collected in Donald Duck’s hat gives bystanders an impromptu cold shower.

1958: A helium shortage prompts the US Government to ask Macy’s to go light on the use of the gas. The company collaborates with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company and the rigging specialists Traynor & Hansen Corporation to come up with a creative solution. According to The New York Times, the balloons are filled with air and then dangled from “large, mobile construction derricks.” The Times also describes a test of the method:

A motorized derrick with a seventy-foot boom had a specially built wood-and-steel hanger attached to the end of the wire hoisting cable. The Toy Soldier, weighing more than 200 pounds deflated, was stretched full-length on a canvas carpet. Limp and sickly looking, it was not the robust figure children and adults are used to seeing. Lines from the body of the balloon were attached to the hanger while two vacuum cleaners, working in reverse, blew in air. An hour of blowing filled the figure out nicely and the boom hoisted it into the air.

1963: Thanksgiving is just six days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. After some debate, Macy’s decides to go ahead with the parade in hopes of raising the national spirit.

1968: Snoopy makes his first appearance as the World War I Flying Ace, but without his red dog house. Since then there have been seven different Snoopy balloons, including an astronaut and an ice skater.
In 1968 also, the Macy’s parade studio moves to its current home in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the former Tootsie Roll Candy Factory.

1969: Smokey the Bear enters the fray.

1971: The balloons are grounded due to high wind, the only year since the parade’s inception when winds are too strong for them to fly.

1973: Like cereal? Is your favorite Crispy Critters? Then you’re happy to note the appearance of Linus the Lion.

1975: The Dino the Dinosaur Balloon is inducted into the Museum of Natural History as an honorary member.

1980s: Smaller “novelty” balloons are introduced, including the Macy’s Stars and the 30 foot high triple-scoop ice cream cone.

1982: Olive Oyl, Popeye’s damsel-in-distress girlfriend, becomes the first female character represented in balloon form in the Thanksgiving Day Parade.

1989: The Parade marches through its very first snowstorm.

1990: Macy’s introduces a new spectacle and a new word — the falloon.  A falloon is a cold-air balloon originating from a float in the parade. The first falloons bring to life characters from The Wizard of Oz and Paddington Bear.

Today’s Parade

Today, as many are talking about a new Cold War, the Macy’s Day Parade is a massive production. It features over a dozen helium-filled balloons up to 40 feet tall and 28 feet wide — but they are required to fold down into a 12 foot by 8 foot box to make the journey through the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey to New York. The parade also includes almost 30 parade floats, 1,500 dancers and cheerleaders, more than 750 clowns, marching bands from around the country, and more than 8,000 participants.

Hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll probably be thinking of a movie or newsreel. Did you know that at the very beginning of the Cold War, in 1946, movies gobbled up 90% of Americans’ total spending on entertainment? Saturday afternoons were great. Double features were best. Weekly attendance figures approached 90 million at a time when the entire population of the country was only 140 million. Clearly, movies were a way of life. Not Netflix or Hulu, but real movies in real theaters!

Holidays were almost always highlighted. For example, if you were coming of age in the early 1950s, you might remember a movie musical starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae titled By the Light of the Silvery Moon, featuring a scene in which the boy Wesley (Billy Gray) tries to save his pet turkey by stealing another turkey for his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. If you’re in the mood for a heavy dose of nostalgia, you can rent the full movie on YouTube.

A Day of Thanksgiving tells the story of the Johnsons, a Mid Western family that can’t afford to buy a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. Even so, they are able to focus on the privileges they have by virtue of living in a country blessed by freedom of choice and abundance.

“Do you know,” Mr. Johnson asks his kids, “that there are some places in the world today where you have to get along without just about everything else” besides life itself?

“Mother,” he goes on to say, is thankful “for all the things our American system makes possible — like washing machines, hot water and a car —  things free people working together can produce.”

An oblique reference to Communism. for sure, but not dogmatic or hysterical. This Thanksgiving — at least at the Johnson’s — is all about gratitude.

Today these films seem innocent, naive, even hokey. Certainly they were family oriented, patriotic, and reflective of the optimism and thankfulness gripping America at the end of World War II. But America’s positive mood would soon evaporate.

By the mid 1950s, the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joe McCarthy were permeating the American consciousness.

The Red Scare in Hollywood

In October 1947, HUAC started a public investigation into Hollywood communism spurred on by a fear that Communist infiltrators of the motion picture industry would use films to spread Soviet propaganda. After all, Hollywood was home to one of the more active sections of the Communist Party USA.

Studio heads (like Walt Disney) and other film industry professionals cooperated with HUAC, furnishing names of suspected leftists in the film industry. Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild, signed up to serve the FBI as a secret informer, code named Agent T-10. Ten current or former members of the Communist Party refused to cooperate with HUAC. Labeled the Hollywood Ten, they were eventually convicted of contempt of Congress.

HUAC’s investigation split the Hollywood community. Supporters of the Ten — including major stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Katherine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, and Frank Sinatra — formed the Committee for the First Amendment in protest.

In the end, the anti communists prevailed and the studios created a “blacklist” to prevent the Hollywood Ten and other communists from ever working in the industry again. The blacklist eventually swelled to over 300 names including Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Orson Welles, Arthur Miller, and Dashiell Hammett. The blacklist had a chilling effect on Hollywood radicals.

HUAC’s actions were compounded by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ‘red baiting’ and accusations of treason. By the mid 1950s Americans were scared to death. Commie plots were cropping up everywhere and Americans were looking for “reds” under their beds, in their workplaces, and even on their playgrounds.

Dark Paranoia

The science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) perfectly captured the dark paranoia of the McCarthy era, with alien invaders secretly occupying human bodies and turning them into soulless “pod people.”

Are the pod people meant to represent Communists, secretly infiltrating American society with an alien ideology that robs the citizenry of free thought and individual liberty? Or are they meant to be McCarthyites, so desperate to prove that they are anti communist that they embrace a conformity that also robs them of free thought or individual liberty?

Either way, the movie captures the fearful mood of the 1950s Cold War era. Just think about the final reel:

“Look!” screams the hero, staring directly into the camera. “You fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see? They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our lives . . . our children . . .they’re here already! You’re next!”

Looking back, it’s easy to see that American  communists were not the danger. There was never going to be a United Soviet States of America.  But by the late 1940s, the Soviet threat itself was very real. The fear of the Soviets, and especially the fear of Soviet nuclear bombs, shaped the American pysche. Is it so surprising, then, to find that the meaning of that most American of holidays — Thanksgiving — evolved to fit the changing circumstances?

The world of A Day of Thanksgiving 1951 saw Americans battling the communists in Korea, far away from the homeland. By the end of the decade, the Russians had conquered space with the launch of Sputnik, and the Cuban Revolution was bringing communism into our own backyard, the Western Hemisphere. Some Americans were exchanging the heartwarming saccharine sweetness of the post World War II years for full scare mode. And it wouldn’t be long before conservative and libertarian columnists traded our historical Thanksgiving of gratitude and friendship for a more ideological Thanksgiving, centered on the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise.  But that’s another story.

Featured Photograph by Adrian Valenzuela

As I think everyone knows, China played a major role in the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War, especially impacting the superpowers’ presence in the Third World.

And, it’s playing a major role today as this year’s American presidential election gets closer.

What do the American people think of China today?

. . . a Pew survey conducted in June and July (of 2020) found that Americans have an increasingly unfavorable view of China, with Democrats especially wary of the U.S.’s close economic relationship with the country and keen to press its leaders on human rights concerns, like the Chinese government’s abuse against Uighurs. Democratic officials are eager to highlight Trump’s record of flattering Chinese President Xi Jingping and overlooking Xi’s failure to uphold his side of Trump’s much-touted trade deal by buying more U.S. goods.” (The Huffington Post, August 22, 2020)

Although the Republicans have chosen not to publish a party platform, President Trump has made clear that being tougher with China would be a top priority in his second term if he is reelected. (Politico, August 23, 2020)

The Democratic party platform, on the other hand mentions China 22 times in largely adversarial terms compared to 7 references in the 2016 document. (The Huffington Post, August 22, 2020)

The Early Cold War

Let’s look back to the early Cold War for some insight.

The Chinese Revolution of 1949 was an especially traumatic event. Both President Roosevelt and President Truman supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China, hoping for a democratic China that would be a pillar of peace in the Far East.

The United States stepped up its economic and military assistance to the Nationalist government, even though American military advisers like General Joseph Stilwell thought that Chiang’s regime was so corrupt that it was not salvageable.

Since Stalin also made his peace with the Nationalist leader, both the Americans and the Soviets were hoping for a reconciliation between the two Chinese factions – Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Nevertheless, all efforts failed.

Mao engaged in a form of guerilla warfare that he called the “people’s war,” combining Marxist-Leninist  political and economic theory with insurgent warfare.

The Communists’ base of power was dependent on the peasantry in the countryside, and the strategy was to strangle urban areas by gradually isolating them. Mao was successful.

Chiang’s regime fell, and the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed on the mainland on October 1, 1949.

American Political Division

In the US, conservative Republicans accused President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of appeasement of communism, although it was obvious to many that Chiang could not have been saved without massive American military intervention. 

As Acheson noted in a State Department White Paper released in the summer of 1949

The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed the result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the result of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not.

Growing Friction

Gradually, China began to play a more independent role on the world stage. Even though Moscow and Beijing signed a Treaty of Alliance in 1950, they became increasingly antagonistic toward each other.

The US was aware of the growing friction.

In November 1950, John Foster Dulles noted:

. . . our best defense lies in exploiting potential jealousies, rivalries, and disaffections within the present area of Soviet Communist control . . .

China on the World Stage

At the Geneva Conference on Indochina in 1954, the Chinese are said to have played an important diplomatic role, persuading North Vietnam to accept the compromise with the French that divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel.

In April 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai was a prominent force at the Bandung Conference of Nonaligned Nations in Indonesia. His speech congratulated the new nations in their struggle for national sovereignty and their growing independence from colonialism.

It’s been reported that the Soviets were jealous of China’s appeal to the nonaligned. As a developing country itself, China could claim solidarity with many nations struggling for national identity and modernization.

China’s economic performance in the 1950s outstripped India’s and seemed more relevant than the Soviet Union’s. At any rate, the Soviets were considered a developed industrial power, a part of the so-called Second World along with its Eastern European satellites. China could claim that it was part of the Third.

As early as 1956, Nikita Krushchev declared:  

. . . in 10 years’ time, the Soviets’ chief enemy in the world [will] be China.

Mao Speaks

In November 1957, Khruschev convened a world conference of 64 Communist parties in Moscow to try to ensure unity in the international Communist movement. It was Mao’s first time in the spotlight on an international stage. (Previously Premier Zhou Enlai had represented the People’s Republic of China.)

In his message, Mao argued that the new strength of the Communist bloc should be an unrelenting campaign against imperialism. He asserted:

It is my opinion that the international situation has now reached a new turning point . . . There is a Chinese saying, ‘Either the East wind prevails over the West wind or the West wind prevails over the East wind.’ It is characteristic of the situation today, I believe, that the East wind is prevailing over the West wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism are overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism.<

Mao went beyond this, though, and argued that there was no reason even to be afraid of nuclear war. 

What if a nuclear war destroyed half of mankind . . . The other half would survive — and so would socialism.

The Soviets React

Khruschev was shocked. The Soviets had earlier promised to help China develop a nuclear arsenal of its own. Now they decided that this was a ‘no go.’

Soon after, the Chinese began harassing the Soviet specialists in their country.  The Soviets responded by pulling all of their 12,000 advisers out of China.

By the summer of 1960, the Sino-Soviet dispute was out in the open. 

The impact of these activities on the Third World was to push the Soviets into a more competitive stance in order to stave off Chinese inroads as well as dampen Western influence.

The Soviets moved to cultivate countries like Indonesia, India, and Burma, both to contain Chinese influence and to counter the Americans. They also provided aid to African countries like Tanzania and Ghana where the Chinese were active.

The Third World

In the Third World, then, both Moscow and Beijing were trying to negate Western influence, with the Chinese spurring on increased Soviet activity.

To the Americans, all the talk about “wars of national liberation” was increasingly threatening. Possibilities for peaceful political change and economic development were elusive. 

Despite the Sino-Soviet competition, there was no good news for the West. 

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Source:

Democrats Are Walking A Fine Line on The Election’s Main Foreign Policy Issue: China (The Huffington Post, August 22, 2020)

Trump cites school choice, China as second-term priorities (POLITICO, August 23, 2020)

Peter Rodman, More Precious Than Peace (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994) all quotes from pages 87-94. 

Photograph by Andrea (Flickr)

In 1947,  New York City was able to avoid an epidemic of Smallpox. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t been so lucky this time around. Here are 8 health scares that occurred during the Cold War, some very different from the pandemic we’re facing in 2020.

#1: Small Pox (1947)

According to a post on Ephemeral New York (March 16, 2020), an American named Eugene Le Bar hopped on a bus in Mexico that was bound for Maine. Soon after boarding, he developed a headache and neck pain. Two days later he broke out in a rash. 

Le Bar got off the bus in New York, checked into a midtown hotel and, despite not feeling well, went out sightseeing with his wife. Four days later he was in Bellevue Hospital. Soon after, he was transferred to Willard Parker Hospital, a facility that specialized in communicable diseases. He died there on March 10, and during an autopsy doctors discovered that he had smallpox.

The disease spread to two other people, and then to a dozen more. 

The city took speedy action. First, hospital workers and anyone who had come in contact with the infected individuals were vaccinated or revaccinated. 

On April 4, New York’s mayor (William O’Dwyer) ordered that the entire city of 6.3 million people be vaccinated or revaccinated. New York didn’t have enough vaccine, so millions of vaccines were quickly manufactured.

A second person died on April 10, spurring the vaccination or revaccination of another 1.3 million people. The city’s slogan became: “Be sure, be safe, be vaccinated.”

In early May, the vaccination program was halted because the outbreak appeared to be contained. We’ll have to wait and see what May brings this time around.

#2: Polio (1950s)

Suspicions and conspiracy theories regarding vaccines have been around as long as vaccines themselves because they are a powerful and, frankly, a scary technology. They are based on placing a version of an often grave disease in the human body, to build up an immune response. In this sense, they carry the potential to create illness instead of preventing it. Most importantly, they are usually administered to a population that is most vulnerable in a physical, social and cultural sense . . .

Suspicions about the development and introduction of live polio vaccines in the 1950s have not only appeared retrospectively. The development of what became the tool of the current global polio eradication campaign was beset by distrust in scientific achievements and worries about intentional harm. 

Russian scientists feared that the Sabin vaccine and its trial in the Soviet Union was part of an American plot to sterilize or kill Soviet children by the millions, while American virologists were suspicious of the Russian claims regarding vaccine safety and efficacy based on field trials. 

Want to learn more? Check out our guest post by Dora Varga, a lecturer in medical humanities at the University of Exeter. The above information is drawn from that post.

#3: ASIAN FLU (1956-1958)

Death Toll: 2 million

Asian Flu was a pandemic outbreak of Influenza A of the H2N2 subtype, that originated in China in 1956 and lasted until 1958. In its two-year spree, Asian Flu traveled from the Chinese province of Guizhou to Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States. Estimates for the death toll of the Asian Flu vary depending on the source, but the World Health Organization places the final tally at approximately 2 million deaths, 69,800 of those in the US alone. (https://www.mphonline.org/worst-pandemics-in-history/)

For a first hand account of the ‘Asian Flu Epidemic’, you can check out Sally Edelstein’s blog post. It’s full of visuals that give you a first hand look at the press coverage at the time.

#4: Agent Orange (1960s)

Long a practice range for the US Navy, forests on the Isla de Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico were also used to test the effects of Agent Orange, a defoliant used in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Studies show that the incidence of cancer among the island’s population is 26% higher than in the rest of Puerto Rico, and the island’s children register high levels of mercury and lead.

In South Vietnam, the President Ngo Dinh Diem was a strong proponent of using herbicidal warfare as a key component of counterinsurgency strategy. Over 1.3 million acres were sprayed in 1968 alone.

As late as 2010, many decades after the war, the question of the long-term effects of exposure to Agent Orange on human health remained controversial. Some scientists have observed a spike in the number of birth defects and stillbirths in areas known to have been heavily sprayed, but others have criticized the methodology used for studies. 

The government of Vietnam says that 4 million of its citizens were exposed to Agent Orange, and as many as 3 million have suffered illnesses because of it. While the US government has challenged these figures as unreliable, the government has documented higher cases of leukemia, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and various kinds of cancer in exposed US veterans.

By April 1993, the Department of Veterans Affairs had compensated only 486 victims out of 39,419 claims by soldiers who had been exposed to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam.

Agent Orange was also used in Laos and Cambodia.

#5: FLU PANDEMIC (1968)

Death Toll: 1 million

A category 2 Flu pandemic sometimes referred to as “the Hong Kong Flu,” the 1968 flu pandemic was caused by the H3N2 strain of the Influenza A virus, a genetic offshoot of the H2N2 subtype. From the first reported case on July 13, 1968 in Hong Kong, it took only 17 days before outbreaks of the virus were reported in Singapore and Vietnam, and within three months it had spread to The Philippines, India, Australia, Europe, and the United States. While the 1968 pandemic had a comparatively low mortality rate (.5%) it still resulted in the deaths of more than a million people, including 500,000 residents of Hong Kong, approximately 15% of its population at the time. (https://www.mphonline.org/worst-pandemics-in-history/)

#6: HIV/AIDS (First identified in 1976)

Death Toll: 36 million

First identified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1976, HIV/AIDS has truly proven itself as a global pandemic, killing more than 36 million people since 1981. Currently there are between 31 and 35 million people living with HIV. The vast majority of those are in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 5% of the population is infected, roughly 21 million people. As awareness has grown, new treatments have been developed that make HIV far more manageable, and many of those infected go on to lead productive lives. Between 2005 and 2012 the annual global deaths from HIV/AIDS dropped from 2.2 million to 1.6 million. (https://www.mphonline.org/worst-pandemics-in-history/)

For a personal account of life during the AIDS crisis you might want to read this article in YES Magazine. It’s titled Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Reflection on the HIV/AIDS Epidemic.

#7: Love Canal (1978)

Watch the video below for a good history of the Love Canal disaster and ramifications.

#8: Chernobyl

If you’re like me you like to take the easy way out sometimes, and I thought the easy way to learn about Chernobyl would be to watch the 5 part series on HBO. The important thing here – and one I didn’t always remember – is that this is a fictionalized recounting with not much to glean that’s actually accurate.

Here are some more factual things you should know:

• The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on Saturday, April 26, 1986, at the No. 4 nuclear reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR.
• According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl. The UN estimates that 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure.

(For more information you might want to read the BBC’s assessment of The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster. You can read it here.)

• According to an article in Wired (May 13, 2019), The Chernobyl Disaster May Have Also Built A Paradise. According to the article, “some scientists think the radioactive, human-free landscape might now be a haven for plants and animals.” You can read that article here.

You still might want to watch the HBO series to pick up on life in the Soviet Union at the time, and the atmospherics of the disaster. Just don’t use the information presented there in your research or on an exam.

Can you think of other scares? Let us know in the comments section below. I thought of the Bhopal disaster in India a bit too late for this post. (You can read about it on Wikipedia here.)

The photo by Amit Gupta (Flickr) is of the Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City. It was abandoned in the middle of the last century.

Concern

It’s election season in the US and more than one of the Democratic primary contenders is touting one form or another of the following: “Our Democracy is in Danger; Our Democracy is at Stake; This Election is About the Future of our Democracy.”

I’ve had conversations with family members, close friends, and acquaintances, but the jury seems to be out on what damage — if any — Donald Trump is doing to our democracy. Some say “the foundations of our democracy are deep and strong. They can withstand four more years of the same.” Others, more reminiscent of Chicken Little, are almost shouting “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Still others suspect that “we’re crying wolf in a crowded theater.”

Since I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t foresee the future, I decided to go back and take a look at the highly regarded 2018 book titled How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Professors of  government at Harvard University.

The Question

Here are some thoughts from the book’s Introduction starting with the question my friends and family have been trying to answer: “Is our (American) democracy in danger?”

The Cold War

The failure of democracy is not new. Democracies have failed before. During the Cold War, the authors note:

Coups d’etat accounted for three out of every four democratic breakdowns.

What happened in Chile provides a good example.

On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile was the victim of a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Allende had been elected three years earlier ‘at the head of a leftist coalition’.

According to the authors:

Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy.

[For more information on Chile during the Cold War be sure to take a look at our Chile post here.]

Happening Now

Levitsky and Ziblatt go on to say, though, that in today’s world:

Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders — presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power . . . [often] democracies erode slowly in barely visible steps.

Venezuela is a good example of what’s happening today.

Hugo Chavez was popularly elected in 1998, coming to power as a political outsider promising to build a more “authentic” democracy, by using oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. In April 2002, he was briefly toppled by the military, but he persevered. He maintained a democratic veneer even as his regime gained control over much of the media, arrested or exiled opposition politicians, and eliminated presidential term limits.

After Chavez’ death, his successor Nicolas Maduro won questionable reelection. By 2017, “nearly two decades after Chavez first won the presidency . . . Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy.”

According to Levitsky and Zeblatt:

This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship — in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule — has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. . . . Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves . . . .

10 Takeaways

Here are 10 more takeaways from the intro to the book.

1. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

2. People don’t immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.

3. An essential test for democracies isn’t whether ‘extremist demagogues’ emerge, but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to keep them from gaining power in the first place.

4. When fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

5. Institutions alone aren’t enough to rein in elected autocrats. Often these individuals use the institutions of democracy to kill it. For example, they pack the courts, buy off the media, and rewrite the rules of politics to ‘tilt the playing field’ against opponents.

6. Democracies work best where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms. Good examples of these norms are mutual toleration and restraint.

7. Democratic norms in the US began to erode in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. Donald Trump may have built on this process, but he didn’t cause it.

8. The erosion of democratic norms in the US is rooted in extreme partisan polarization and conflict over race and culture.

9. There are reasons for alarm in the US today. But other countries’ experiences teach us that breakdown is neither inevitable or irreversible.

10. We need to learn from other countries to see the warning signs — and recognize the false alarms.

What’s Next

In sum, I don’t like what I’m reading,  but I’m not jumping to conclusions either. I’m anxious to read the book’s case studies to see what I can figure out. I hope you’ll join me. You can buy the book on Amazon by clicking on the image below. It’s my affiliate link.

Or you can check it out from your local library.

Let me know what you think of the author’s argument in the comments.

Photograph by djandyw.com aka nobody (Flickr): Venezuela protest, February 15, 2014.

Welcome to the holiday issue of Cold War Magazine. We’re all about Cold War history, culture, and politics. Most of all. we’re about Cold War fun! In this issue, we double down on Cold War toys, and Christmas traditions in the early years of the Cold War. Here are some of the articles you’ll find.

Cold War Toys

Early Cold War toys tell us a lot about the beginning years of the half century conflict. They were one way parents could communicate important issues of the day to their children.

Santa Claus Meets Ded Maroz

Most Americans so demonized the Soviets that it was hard to imagine Russian families around a Christmas tree opening presents. This was a big mistake.

Just Like Mom

According to American Cold War ideology, homemakers in the US were a bulwark against communism. Girls’ toys reflected the consumer economy of the day.

Boys’ Toys

While girls were busy learning about fashion from Barbie, boys were learning how not to be”sissies.”

Also:

Toys for the Atomic Age

Do You Hear What I Hear? (Only available via PDF download).

You can check us out on your mobile device!  OR access the magazine as a PDF. Just click here to download.

I am a Cold War baby, born into a contentious and argumentative Irish-American family. Holidays  and Sundays always found someone storming away from the dinner table. But there were certain things we didn’t fight about — like Santa Claus and the Pilgrims. I thought they were sacred. But I learned something today when I came across a multitude of articles arguing about the meaning of Thanksgiving. Santa Claus may still be sacred, but the Pilgrims certainly aren’t.

This may not mean much to you if you don’t live in the United States, but just bear with me. Every country has its heroes and its legends and, for most Americans, Pilgrims top the list. They’re the backbone of our country.

The story I heard when I was growing up goes something like this:

Settlers arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620 to escape religious persecution. They established the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, but then went through some very hard times.

The native Americans helped them, and the colonists had a good harvest. In gratitude to God, they held the first Thanksgiving, sharing the fruits of their labor with Squanto and other Indian friends who had taught them how to hunt and farm in their new environment.

The Thanksgiving celebration became a yearly tradition soon shared with the other early colonies. As America grew and prospered, the annual holiday of thankfulness and gratitude was institutionalized, continuing until the present.

Is this the story you grew up believing? Maybe. Maybe not.

If you grew up in the second half of the Cold War you might have heard a different take. I only heard it recently. The new interpretation of Thanksgiving which has been around since at least the late 1960s goes something like this:

The early settlers at Plymouth experimented with a system of collective ownership of farmland which led to widespread famine. They eventually abandoned this system in favor of private ownership. Farmers became more productive, the harvest was bountiful, and Thanksgiving was their celebration. This makes the Pilgrims America’s first staunch anti-communists.

Sound good?

Well wait a minute! This narrative was first told through a Cold War lens, and first gained popularity at the height of the Cold War.  The actual timeline tells a different story.

In actuality, the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621 two years before the Pilgrims shifted to private ownership.  At the time of the first Thanksgiving, there was a system of collective ownership in the colony known as the “common course,” an agreement that all agriculture should be a collective, community undertaking.

The “common course” was abandoned in 1623, two years after the first Thanksgiving celebration. At that time, because of a corn shortage, the colonists “began to think how they might raise” more.  It was decided, according to their governor, William Bradford, that “they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves.” Bradford “assigned to every family a parcel of land,” ending the communal cultivation of corn.

So what’s the real story?

I think the best way to find out would be to plow through a couple of books. The most definitive would be Governor William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, first published in full in 1856. The most popular version of this writing, though, was edited by the historian Samuel Eliot Morison in 1952. I haven’t read the governor’s journal, so I can’t expound on his story, but I do know that Morison’s version was published during a time period when Americans were becoming extremely suspicious of the Soviets and their economic system. So it’s fair to say that the work was edited through a Cold War lens. But don’t take my word for it.

Richard Pickering, a historian of early America and Deputy Director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum dedicated to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive says:

The Challenges of the cold war and dealing with Russia are reflected in the text . . . .

William Hogeland, the author of Inventing American History agrees. He says:

Across the political spectrum, there’s a tendency to grab a hold of some historical incident and yoke it to a current agenda. It doesn’t always mean there’s no connection, but often things are presented as historical first, rather than as part of the agenda first.

Another book you might want to read is Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World (2010) by Nick Bunker. I haven’t read this book either. So I can’t really answer the questions: What is historical fact? What is political agenda?

But I have figured out that the political ‘right’ in the United States has its own version of Thanksgiving, a revisionist history that’s very different from the narrative that I learned as a kid in my very conservative community. Instead of thankfulness and family, this group’s focus is on the idea that Thanksgiving is a celebration of the pilgrims’ abandonment of socialism in favor of free enterprise.

Various conservative and libertarian personalities have weighed in on this topic, people like Henry Hazlitt in 1968, and, later, George F. Will and Rush Limbaugh. Their interpretations are summed up in the last paragraph of Richard J. Maybury’s piece in the blog Mises Daily called The Great Thanksgiving Hoax. Maybury argues:

. . . the real meaning of Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

What do you think? Were the Pilgrims socialists? Or were they capitalists? What do the Pilgrims mean to you?

My answer to these questions comes quite easily. I like to pretend like I’m in grade school again in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, at the height of the Cold War. I’m marching down the aisle of my school auditorium, my arms full of canned goods, belting out the hymn we always sang near Thanksgiving:

Come ye thankful people come —

raise the song of harvest home;

all is safely gathered in,

ere the winter storms begin.

God our maker doth provide

for our wants to be supplied;

come to God’s own temple, come,

raise the song of harvest home.

The text of this hymn was written in 1810, long before before the First Red Scare and the later Cold War. It was also written before the earliest publication of William Bradford’s journal. For now, it’s the interpretation that I favor. But I may think differently after this Thanksgiving when I finally have a chance to watch the PBS film by Ken Burns called The Pilgrims, a two-hour documentary that supposedly endeavors to tell the true story of the early colonists. Will the documentary settle the arguments or will it just be another piece of revisionist history? Watch it and decide.

Featured Photograph by Henry Zbyszynski on Flickr