Andrea Friedman

The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics

Despite historians’ best efforts to disassociate the anti-communist purges of the post-World War II era from one individual’s extreme behavior, the early Cold War years continue to be known as the McCarthy era, and Senator Joseph McCarthy remains a symbol—perhaps the paramount symbol—of irrationality and illegitimacy in American politics. His fall from grace in 1954 likewise denotes the return to moral order and political sanity. McCarthy did not introduce the practices and policies of political repression and sexual oppression that constituted the domestic Cold War, and many of those practices and policies outlasted him. Nonetheless, he inhabits our memories as their most visceral representation. The man—his name, his face, as much as his behavior—stands for the era.1

Sadists and Sissies: Anti‐pornography Campaigns in Cold War America

Examination of anti-obscenity campaigns in the post-war years suggests that the ideals of masculinity mandated by cold war politics troubled Americans in ways more complex than historians have recognised. Psychiatrists, politicians and clubwomen focused on the graphic depiction of an aggressive, even violent, male heterosexuality in comic books and erotica to suggest that American men had become too hard and undomesticated, unable to sustain the institution so central to the American way of life – the family. Framed as a defence of beleaguered mothers and their children against male sadists, these campaigns expressed the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting demands on gender and family ideologies required by the domestic and foreign policies of the cold war.