Description

This cultural history explores a part of America's recent past almost too strange to be true, although some will remember it firsthand: the Cold War at the grassroots level.

Richard M. Fried begins with the nationwide sanctification of the American flag and the widespread, if occasionally coercive, acceptance of the Pledge of Allegiance. He then describes how organizations such as the Ad Council and the American Heritage Foundation created "campaigns to sell America to the Americans" through carefully constructed "rededication" celebrations like Know Your America Week and Freedom Week, as well as traveling exhibitions like the Freedom Train, which brought original copies of seminal American documents to exhibit halls across the US. Fried also revisits the 1950 "Communist invasion" of Mosinee, Wisconsin--a staged media event sponsored by the American Legion--in which citizens let themselves be searched at random while local officials acted as Stalinists and area restaurants were required to se only potato soup and black bread. Meticulously researched and colorfully told, this book recreates a captivating--and revealing--dimension of our history.

Reviews

"A wonderful account of civil pagenatry in the McCarthy era, when true patriots observed "Loyalty Day," rode the "Freedom Train," and marched in "Wake Up, America" parades. In the crowded field of Cold War scholarship, The Russians are Coming stands out for its originality, its elegant writing, and its often hilarious recreation of the grass-roots struggle against communism in the ominous days of Alger Hiss, atomic air raid drills, and the Korean War. A must read for anyone interested in modern American history, and a fun read as well."--David Oshinsky, Rutgers University

"Richard Fried's The Russians are Coming is a significant new approach to our understanding of domestic aspects of the cold war. Drawing on a rich array of original sources, Fried shows how a government-private partnership created public pageants to generate popular support for the conflict with the Soviet Union. No other work explains so well how prominent officials and business leaders tried to persuade ordinary people to see connections between their daily lives and the global competition with the Soviet Union."--Robert D. Schulziner, University of Colorado, Boulder

Product Details

240 pages; 1 halftones; 5-1/2 x 8-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-513417-9ISBN10: 0-19-513417-6

About the Author(s)