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

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

Recently, I’ve been seeing lots of news headlines like this one from the New York Times: “For some, Afghanistan Outcome Affirms a Warning: Beware the Blob.”

At first read, I didn’t know what they were talking about because the only BLOB I could think of was a 1958 film where an alien lifeform consumes everything in its path as it grows and grows. That, or some kind of gooey stuff that they only sell at Halloween. But then I read the teaser:

The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan exposed the shortcomings of views within the foreign policy establishment, also known as ‘The Blob.’

The text of the article went on to say:

The term “Blob” is generally understood to describe members of the mainstream foreign policy establishment — government officials, academics, Council on Foreign Relations panelists, television talking heads and the like — who share a collective belief in the obligation of the United States to pursue an aggressive, interventionist policy in the post- 9/11 world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen in this context as Blob-approved.

When I read this I started wondering: When did the Wise Men morph into THE BLOB?

The Wise Men

You remember The Wise Men don’t you? They’re the group of six men who shaped America’s emergence as a post World War II superpower during the early years of the Cold War.

I’ve just started reading the definitive book about them, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made,  by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. (paid link) I picked up the book — in fact, I’m obsessed now with the beginning of the Cold War — because of the mess we seem to have made in the world writ large. I’m confused about how we went from The American Century to (purported) American Decline. I’m still in Chapter One (Architects of the American Century) but I have to admit that I’m impressed by men who were bipartisan by nature, and who often served under presidents from a political party that was different than their own.

Six Wise Men

A brief rundown of each of the six follows:

William Averell Harriman (called Averell) was Ambassador to the Soviet Union when Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. As Roosevelt’s “special envoy” to Churchill and Stalin, he’s said to have “grown increasingly dubious about Franklin Roosevelt’s hopes that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could be allies in peace as they had been in war. . .”

• Harriman made his first visit to Russia in 1899, when Nicholas II was czar. His last visit was in 1983, at the invitation of Yuri Andropov.
• He negotiated his own private Soviet mineral concessions with Trotsky, spent more time with Stalin than any other American, and worked out a limited test-ban treaty with Khruschev.

Harriman’s “attitude toward the Soviets was that of a tough businessman toward a competitor, firm yet pragmatic. . . . He earned the nickname ‘the Crocodile’ by affecting a drowsy manner that would suddenly give way to a snap of action.”

George Kennan was an embassy counselor to Averell Harriman. He helped shape Harriman’s views about the Soviets and he even drafted some of the ambassador’s cables.

• Kennan was “the intellectual darling of the Washington elite” with a long career in the Foreign Service.
  The author of the famous Long Telegram, he warned of the Kremlin’s expansionist ambitions. In this 8,000 word cable dated February 22, 1946, Kennan speaks of Russia’s insecurity and of her persistent efforts to extend her borders. He recommends that the United States adopt a “policy of containment.”
• Writing anonymously as “Mr. X,” Kennan formulated the containment theory that characterized the U.S. approach to the Soviets during the Cold War.

John McCloy, Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of War, had a ‘distaste for ideological battles’ and was particularly suited to action. He was convinced that the U.S. could not return to a policy of isolationism, but must exert leadership in a changing world.

• McCloy served as president of the World Bank and as High Commissioner for Germany.
• Later, he was chairman of both Chase Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations.

McCloy “may hold the record for the number of Cabinet posts rejected by one man, preferring to spend most of his life as one of the nation’s most influential private citizens.”

Robert Abercrombie Lovett was Harriman’s former Wall Street partner. A superb administrator, he “did more than any other man to bring the U.S. into the age of strategic air power.”

• Lovett also served as Secretary of Defense. He served in the cabinet of President Harry S. Truman from 1951 to 1953 and in this capacity, directed the Korean War.
• John F. Kennedy offered him a choice of cabinet posts: State, Defense, or Treasury. Lovett turned them all down, but recommended the three men who ended up in the jobs.

Lovett was convinced that strategic bombing was critical in ending the war in Germany. He advocated doing the same in Japan.

Dean Gooderham Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State in 1945, had worked with Harriman on Lend-Lease negotiations with the Kremlin, and was known for his ‘flashy wit.’ He was convinced that Truman had good instincts and would depend on the right people.

• Acheson was Truman’s main foreign policy advisor from 1945 to 1947, especially regarding the Cold War. He was appointed Truman’s Secretary of State in 1947.
• He is said to be “more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than President Truman and more responsible for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall.”

Acheson’s memoir, Present at the Creation, is a must read. (paid link)

Charles Bohlen served as the State Department’s liaison to the White House during the Truman administration. He was the first to inform Truman that “the Soviets were ignoring the pledges made at Yalta two months earlier.

• Bohlen was one the nation’s foremost Soviet experts at the outset of the Cold War.
• With Kennan, Bohlen helped open the first U.S. Mission to the Soviet Union following American recognition of that country in 1933.
• Bohlen set up a meeting for Harriman with the powers that be at the State Department where “the ambassador stressed the ‘basic and irreconcilable differences of objective between the Soviet Union and the United States.’”
• Later, with Harriman, he advised Harry Truman on the Soviets, the need for America to help rebuild Europe, and on the bomb.

At the end of his career, Bohlen served as the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow.

Just as Biden seeks to transform American policy today by shifting efforts toward China and away from Europe and the Middle East, these six men were at the forefront of a remarkable transformation of American policy. They shaped a new world order, authored a doctrine of containment, and forged an array of alliances that have been the foundation of American policy.

Criticism and Praise

Clearly, the group of men discussed above were the embodiment of the American Establishment during the Cold War’s formative years. As such they were often criticized. For example, in a celebrated 1966 speech to the Americans for Democratic Action, John Kenneth Galbraith, the esteemed economist, “blamed the deepening Vietnam entanglement” on the group, calling them “the foreign policy syndicate of New York . . .”

Still, they were praised by others. Henry Kissinger writes:

For the entire postwar period, foreign policy had been ennobled by a group of distinguished men who, having established their eminence in other fields, devoted themselves to public service.

He goes on to call them

An aristocracy dedicated to the service of this nation on behalf of principles beyond partisanship.

Paul Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms, speaks of the “golden age of the Establishment,” noting:

I have never seen such a panoply of first-class people, who never thought of putting their interests above the nation’s.

The Blob

Now let’s cut to the present day, and the sense that the current foreign policy establishment, THE BLOB, gets things all wrong, and that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a defeat for its position.

According to The New York Times, the term was coined in 2016 by Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser for President Obama. Rhodes says it was meant to be a criticism directed at foreign-policy experts with an “unrealistic set of assumptions about what America could do in the world.” Back in 2016, he singled out “Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties” with a tendency to “whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order.”

Not surprisingly, a lot of people took umbrage at the label and Rhodes’ explanation. In fact, Foreign Affairs published an essay titled “In Defense of the Blob: America’s Foreign Policy Establishment Is the Solution, Not the Problem.”

What do you think? Is there a BLOB? If so, does THE BLOB always get things all wrong? And just how did ‘The Wise Men’ become THE BLOB? In today’s world, is everyone who opposed the withdrawal from Afghanistan an inhabitant of Blogdom?

Maybe we’d all be better off if we just tuned out of the controversy, made a big bowl of popcorn, and watched the 1958 movie.  I’ve read that even Ben Rhodes thinks his creature has grown out of control.

You can stream the full movie with Steve McQueen on YouTube for free.  The trailer is below.

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Photograph by Manhhai: Draper Hill cartoon lampooning America’s Containment policy in the Cold War. For more information see https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/draper-hill-containment-policy-cartoon/

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How many of you play chess or at least watched The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix?

Do you wonder if chess actually played an important role in the Cold War or do you think it’s just suggestive of the American-Russian rivalry?

Well, if you’re sick of being mired in bad news and want a little entertainment, here are two fairly recent movies and a Netflix series that can provide some insight.

The Coldest Game

The first movie, The Coldest Game, is available on Netflix. It’s a Polish Production set in Poland, but the dialogue is primarily in English. I think it’s the weakest of the offerings even though it includes lots of original footage of events surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The story revolves around an alcoholic math genius who is abducted by US officials and convinced to play in a US-Soviet chess match in 1962.

Bill Pullman does a great job in his role as Professor Manksy, and some of you may find it really enjoyable. Audiences seem to be split.

The blog decider.com says:

This is Thirteen Days crossed with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy crossed with Searching for Bobby Fischer crossed with, um, Barfly. Or Arthur. Take your pick.

Need help deciding?

Here’s a trailer that makes it look more coherent than it is.

Pawn Sacrifice

I really enjoyed this next movie, Pawn Sacrifice, a film by Edward Zwick about Fischer’s chess match against the Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. You can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube.

The Fischer-Spassky match was played in Iceland in the summer of 1972 with the title of world champion at stake.

A New York Times review by Neil Genzlinger in 2015 argues that the film is only partly about Bobby Fischer.

It is equally about us — Americans or any other nationality inclined to put too much importance on chess matches, soccer matches, space races, whatever. It’s about how we manufacture celebrities on scant pretext and then destroy them, or allow them to destroy themselves while we watch.

Like The Coldest Game, the film includes original footage, illustrating that the match was treated not just as a sports event but as a symbolic showdown between the ideologies represented by the US and the Soviet Union.

Watch the trailer here.

The Queen’s Gambit

And then there’s The Queen’s Gambit – a Netflix miniseries with a 4.9 star rating out of 23,611 reviews on ‘google’.

Set during the Cold War era, orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon struggles with addiction in her quest to become the greatest chess player in the world.

In its review, The New Yorker Magazine calls it “the most satisfying show on television.”

I don’t play chess, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of the actual chess scenes. But I am awfully competitive, so I got too hyped up to binge watch.

The Cold War isn’t quite as overpowering here as in the other two films, but I think it gives you more of the actual atmosphere of the era.

Here’s the trailer.

All three are highly recommended for anyone who wants to turn off cable TV. How much bad news can you watch?

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Photograph by Matt on 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.

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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.

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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)