The Origins of the Cold WarAuthor(s): Thomas G. PatersonSource: OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Summer, 1986), pp. 5-9, 18Published by: Organization of American HistoriansStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25162491 .

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SPECIAL SECTION ON THE COLD WAR

The Origins

of the

Cold War

by Thomas G. Paterson

The history of the origins of the Cold War used to be simple: the

menacing Russian bear grasped the

globe with both hands while Uncle Sam scurried about trying to contain the giant out of the East. The Soviets

acted; the Americans reacted. The Russians obstructed the postwar peace; the Americans worked to build an open world of peace and

prosperity. Moscow exploited; Wash

ington saved. Until the 1960s the

prevailing view of the early Cold War followed this "good guys/bad guys" script. This point of view as

sumed that the United States in the

1940s, after the debacle of the "iso lationist" 1930s, had to assume

world leadership because it was best

positioned with power to fashion a stable postwar world and because it

was best equipped with principles whose application would free human kind from the curses of economic

depression, political extremism, and war. It was time to grab hold of his

tory and make it conform to the American way, thought Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Smith, 416). The traditional interpretation also held that the United States was an

exceptional nation. Sure it had had its brief imperialist phase in the late

1890s, but it had been a good impe rialist?never so brutish as the Brit ish in India or the Soviets in Eastern

Europe.

As for how the Cold War began, this view was unequivocal: an expan

sionist Soviet Union with unlimited

ambitions, an uncompromising ideol

ogy, and a paranoid dictator bent on world domination and the elimination of democracy and capitalism. Ameri cans had no choice but to resist total itarian aggression?to contain Josef

Stalin the way they had turned back Adolf Hitler. There were no alterna

tives; negotiations with the Soviets were useless. They were not house

broken, remarked Acheson: "They were abusive; they were rude. I just didn't like them" (NYT, Oct. 13, 1971).

This generally accepted view of the origins of the Cold War, then, depicted a United States forced into an activist international role by exter

nal forces, especially by the Soviet threat. America had to take defensive

measures?witness the Truman Doc

trine, Marshall Plan, and North At lantic Treaty Organization?to

protect a vulnerable world. Moscow

started the Cold War, pure and

simple. Not only did policymakers like President Harry S. Truman ex

plain events this way; in the national istic mood of the Cold War until the 1960s historians did as well.1

In the early 1960s three important changes coincided to invite a differ

ent, more sophisticated, better

researched reading of the tumultuous

1940s when the Cold War began. First, the decline of McCarthyism in the late 1950s eased the repressive atmosphere created by the Senator from Wisconsin and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. That at

mosphere had stymied discussion of alternative interpretations, for the consensus of vehement anti

communism treated dissent as some

thing close to disloyalty. Indeed, unorthodox opinion might have earned an American a trip to the in

timidating chambers of the HUAC

(House Committee on Un-American

Activities). But with the decline of Mc

Carthyism came more questioning of traditional assumptions, more free

dom of expression. The signs were

everywhere: poetry by the iconoclas tic "beats;" the publication of C.

Wright Mills' Power Elite (1956); Playboy magazine's assault on sexual

mores; Martin Luther King's Mont

gomery bus boycott (1955) and the

Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in

(1960). In diplomatic history, Wil liam Appleman Williams Tragedy of

American Diplomacy (1959) boldly challenged the consensus. Rejecting the notion that the United States was an innocent only reacting to foreign aggression, Williams argued that the entire history of the U.S. was one of

expansion abroad, including tram

pling on the rights of other nations.

Summer 1986 5

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America's foreign policy was deliber

ately and self-consciously seeking not

only to save sinners and reform

transgressors, but also to gain foreign markets through an "open door"

policy. The American system became

dependent upon economic expan sion?at least Americans thought so?and that outward thrust sent the

United States into the Cold War con frontation with the Soviets.

The second influence leading to

changing views on the Cold War was

the Vietnam War. That wrenching war that seemed to have no begin ning and no end sparked debate not

just on its conduct and length but on

its origins. How did Southeast Asia

become defined as vital to the na

tional interest? Who was the enemy

exactly? What was the threat exactly? How did we get from the Truman Doctrine of 1947 to Vietnam in the

1960s? What were the sources of the

doctrine of global containment? And

because official explanations about the war and its progress often turned out to be disingenuous or distorting, a credibility gap grew, inviting doubts about the Cold War mentality and the traditional interpretations of the Soviet-American contest.

Even George F. Kennan, whose

"X" article in Foreign Affairs (1947) had distinguished him as one

of the architects of containment, told a national television audience watch

ing Senate hearings that containment was designed for the stable nation states of Europe in the 1940s where the United States had long-standing ties. It did not fit, he asserted, the volatile region of Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The Vietnam War, with all of its frustrations of body counts,

victory-just-around-the-corner decla

rations, steady escalation, and great

economic costs at home generated new thinking about America's over

seas role and the beginnings of

global management. To question Vietnam, then, was to question the

early Cold War period as well. The third change inspiring doubts

about the Cold War consensus was

the declassification and opening to

scholars of early Cold War docu

ments?National Security Council re

ports, presidential memoranda,

briefing papers, memoranda of con

versations, telegrams between embas

sies abroad and the Department of

State, drafts of speeches, diaries, and more. These papers permitted the scholar to follow policy-making al

most on a day-to-day basis at the

highest levels. All the questioning permitted by the decline of Mc

Carthyism and induced by the Viet nam War would not have had a great impact on scholarship had it not been

possible to test the questions in the rich historical sources themselves. The release of documents followed a

normal procedure in the 1960s: after 25 years a document could be down

graded from "Top Secret" or "Se cret" and made available to scholars.

Besides opening State Department records and the papers of Truman and his advisers at the Truman Li

brary in Independence, Missouri, the State Department's valuable Foreign Relations of the United States docu

mentary series was published. Vol umes covering diplomacy near the end of the Second World War and

early Cold War were published in the 1960s. No longer would historians

have to rely on Truman's often unre

liable Memoirs (1955-1956), White House and State Department press re

leases, newspaper accounts, or the

published letters and diaries of decision-makers like Secretary of State James Forrestal (Millis).

From these three changes emerged new interpretations?sometimes called "revisionist"?with which I am sympathetic and may have helped to shape. Revisionists are certainly not unified in their views. Some, like Gabriel Kolko, have argued that cap italism drove an aggressive United

States, and he branded Washington the villain. Others, like Gar Alpero vitz, Barton J. Bernstein, Walter

LaFeber, Daniel Yergin, and Lloyd Gardener, have blended ideological, historical, political, and strategic ele ments with the economic element to

explain the origins of the Cold War. Most of these dissenters from the of

ficial explanation believed that it was too one-sided in blaming interna tional trouble on the Soviet Union,

ignoring the interaction of the great powers. The United States was not

simply reacting to Soviet machina

tions; it was acting on its own needs and ideas in a way that made Ameri can behavior alarm not just the Sovi

ets but America's allies the British and French as well.

Why did Truman think it necessary to project American power abroad, to

pursue an activist, global, foreign policy unprecedented in United States

history? First, Americans drew les sons from their experience in the

1930s, when they supposedly in

dulged their "isolationism," letting economic depression spawn political extremism and war. Never again,

they vowed. No more appeasement, no more Munichs. And were not all totalitarians alike, be they the Nazis of the 1930s or the Communists of the 1940s? "Red fascism" became a

popular phrase to express this Ameri can reading of historical lessons. To

prevent a replay of the 1930s, then, the United States would have to use

its vast economic power to battle economic instability, hence foreign aid like the $13 billion European Re

covery Program, assistance to Greece

and Turkey, and Point Four technical assistance.

Another reason Americans felt

compelled to project their power was their calculation of economic need and fear of depression. America's devastated European customers sim

ply lacked the dollars to purchase American products. Exports, valued at $10 billion in 1945 and 1946,

were considered vital to the nation's economic health. To aid Europeans, then, was not only to help them, but to sustain a high American standard of living. Then, too, the fear of post war shortages of petroleum carried the United States into Middle Eastern oil fields, where American companies came to control half of the region's oil reserves.

A third explanation for American activism is found in new strategic thinking. Because of the advent of the air age, travel across the world

was shortened in time. Strategists spoke of the shrinkage of the globe. Places once deemed beyond Ameri can curiosity or interest now loomed

important. Airplanes could now

travel great distances to deliver pow erful bombs. Powerful as the United States was, then, it seemed vulner

able to air attack. "The Pearl Harbor of a future war might well be Chi

cago, or Detroit, or even Washing

ton," noted General Carl A. Spaatz

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Step on it, Doc!

Roy Justus. The Minneapolis Star, 1947.

Campaigning for the Marshall Plan. Courtesy of The Minneapolis Star.

(Maclsaac, 10). To prevent such an

unhappy occurrence, American lead

ers worked for "defense in depth," a

series of overseas bases in both the Pacific and Atlantic worlds to deny a

potential enemy an attack route to the Western Hemisphere. Such forward bases would also permit the United States to conduct offensive operations more effectively. The American stra

tegic frontier had to be pushed out ward. Thus the United States took the former Japanese-controlled is lands of the Carolines, Marshalls, and Marianas; maintained garrisons in Germany and Japan; and sent mili

tary missions to Saudi Arabia, Iran,

Turkey, Greece, China, and fourteen Latin American states (Leffler).

These several explanations for American globalism suggest that the United States would have been an

expansionist power whether or not the obstructionist Soviets were lurk

ing about. As the influential National

Security Council Paper No. 68 noted in April of 1950, the "overall pol icy" of the United States was "de

signed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish." This policy "we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat."2

Besides pointing out America's contribution to Cold War tensions

through its expansionist posture, dis

senters from the orthodox view asked scholars to stop applying a double standard because, like other great powers in history, the United States was building spheres of influence. Americans may have thought them selves exceptional?and they were,

in the nobility of their principles? but they behaved like imperialists in

flexing their international muscle, even practicing "atomic diplomacy" in an abortive attempt to gain conces

sions from the Soviets. If the Soviets feared that the United States would

woo Eastern European nations to the American side and thus weaken Rus sia's heavy-handed drive for security in the region, the British protested that Americans were horning in on their interests in the Middle East and the French objected that Washington

was too rapidly rebuilding just defeated Germany. And, if "free elections" were good for Eastern Eu

rope, as American leaders demanded, why were they not also appropriate in Latin America, where the United

States nurtured dictators like Somoza of Nicaragua and Trujillo of the Do

minican Republic? If the internation alization of the Danube River in the Soviet sphere was sound, as Ameri

cans argued, then why not the inter nationalization of the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal as well?

Critics of the Cold War consensus

also suggested that the Cold War was not inevitable, although conflict cer

tainly was. But the extremes of pas

sionate rhetoric, nuclear arms race,

globe-circling alliance systems, and client-state wars might have been

tempered, if not avoided, by a more concerted effort to negotiate differ ences. Critics of the time, like Henry A. Wallace and Walter Lippman, urged the Truman Administration to

practice diplomacy (no American

president negotiated with a Soviet Premier after Potsdam in 1945 until the Geneva Conference of 1955), use the United Nations Organization, stay out of civil wars like those in China and Greece, dispense with the "either-or" alarmist sketches of

global politics, give economic rather than military aid, and avoid the rush to an indiscriminate globalism that

would drain the nation's patience and resources. Revisionist scholars, in

other words, found in the 1940s crit ics a viable, reasoned, but rejected

alternative to official policy (Pater son; Steel).

The revisionist interpretation of the

origins of the Cold War has been es

pecially suggestive in tackling a key question: What was the nature of the Soviet threat? Most scholars agree to

day that American leaders exagger ated the Soviet threat. They imagined an adversary possessing more power and ambition than the real Soviet Union. George F. Kennan himself has admitted that he exaggerated the Soviet threat; he later wrote that "the

image of a Stalinist Russia poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of nuclear weapons, was

largely a crea

tion of the Western imagination" (Kennan, 128). The evidence seems clear that even if the Soviets had wanted to dominate the world, or just

Western Europe, they lacked the ca

pabilities to do so. The Soviets had no foreign aid to dispense; outside the Soviet Union, Communist parties

were minorities; and the Soviet econ

omy was seriously crippled by the war. Most important, the Soviets lacked a modern navy, a strategic air

force, the atomic bomb (until 1949), and air defenses. Their wrecked

economy could not support or supply an army in the field for very long, and their technology lagged. Soviet

Summer 1986 7

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Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference (from left to right). U.S.

Army photo, courtesy of the Truman Library.

ground forces lacked motorized trans

portation, adequate equipment, and

troop morale. A Soviet blitzkrieg in vasion of Western Europe had little chance of success, and the Russians knew it. Even if they had managed to move across Western Europe and

gain temporary control, they could not strike the United States. So they would have to assume defensive po sitions and await crushing American

attacks, probably including atomic

bombings of Soviet Russia itself? war plans for which existed.

Other evidence from recent schol

arship suggests that the Soviet mili

tary threat was more myth than

reality. The Soviet Union demobi lized its forces after the war, drop

ping to about 2.9 million personnel in 1948. Many of its 175 divisions

were under-strength and large num

bers of them were engaged in occu

pation duties in Eastern Europe. American intelligence sources re

ported that the Soviets could not count on troops of the occupied countries to help; in fact, these sol diers amounted to a hindrance to So viet military effectiveness. At most, the Soviets had between 700,000 and

800,000 troops available for attack

against the West. To resist such an

attack, the West had about 800,000

troops or approximate parity. It would have been suicidal for the So viets to make military moves to ward the West, and no American leader

thought them such. In fact, few American decision-makers expected a Soviet onslaught against Western Eu

rope. They and their intelligence sources emphasized Soviet military and economic weaknesses, not

strengths; Soviet hesitancy, not bold ness (Evangelista; Wells).

Why, then, did Americans so fear the Soviets? Why did the Central In

telligence Agency, Joint Chiefs of

Staff, and the President exaggerate the Soviet threat? First, because their

intelligence estimates were just that?estimates. The American intel

ligence community was still in a state of infancy, hardly the well-developed instrument of American foreign pol icy that it is today. Americans lacked

complete assurance that their figures were close to the mark. When lead

ers do not know, they tend to assume the worst of an adversary's intentions and capabilities, to think that the So viets might miscalculate, sparking a war they did not want. Second, Tru man liked things black and white, no

gray. Nuances, ambiguities, and

counter-evidence were often dis

counted to satisfy the President's

preference for the simple answer or to match his preconceived notions of Soviet aggressiveness. In mid-1946, for example, the Joint Chiefs of Staff deleted a section that stressed Soviet weaknesses from a report to Truman.

Third, American leaders, particu

larly military officers, overplayed the Soviet threat in order to garner larger defense budgets from Congress. Tru man himself bristled at times over

the military's huge appetite and hy perbole. Americans may also have

exaggerated the Soviet threat because their attention to the Utopian Commu nist goal of world revolution led them to confuse goals with actual be havior. A related explanation is that Americans thought the sinister Sovi ets and their Communist allies might exploit postwar economic, social,

and political disorder, not through a

military thrust but through subver sion. The recovery of Germany and

Japan, then, became necessary to

deny the Communists political oppor tunities which might thwart American

plans for the integration of these for mer enemies into an American sys

tem of trade and defense. And because economic dislocations troubled so much of Eurasia, Com

munist gains might deny the United States strategic raw materials. That

this view oversimplified international realities by underestimating local conditions that might block Soviet/ Communist gains and overestimating the Soviet ability to act is true. But

what is important here, in this over

view of how the Cold War began, is that Americans nonetheless believed it. And, of course, the blundering and noisome Soviets did little to dis arm it.

Why has recent scholarship em

phasized this question of the exagger ation of the Soviet threat? Because it led to an expansion of American mil

itary power that reached beyond ac tual needs. Because it encouraged the Soviets to fear encirclement and

thereby enlarge their own military es

tablishment and stimulate a greater arms race. Because it put a damper on diplomacy. Because it led Ameri cans to misrepresent events, to mis

read realities.

Take the case of Eastern Europe. Once considered a simple matter of

the Soviets' determination to con

8 Magazine of History

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struct an iron curtain or bloc after the

war, the Soviet presence in Eastern

Europe is now seen by historians in more complex terms. The Soviets had profound security fears in the wake of a world war that cost them

perhaps as many as 20 million dead.

Moreover, the Soviets had no blue

print for the region and followed dif ferent policies in different countries: Poland and Rumania were quickly subjugated as border states; Tito's

Yugoslavia was an independent Com munist nation, breaking dramatically with Stalin in 1948; and in Czecho

slovakia, free elections in 1946

brought to power a non-Communist

government that functioned until 1948. The Soviets did not have a

firm grip on Eastern Europe before 1948?a prime reason why many

American leaders believed the Sovi ets were weak. And American poli cies toward the region, evidenced in

pressure for elections that would have produced anti-Soviet govern

ments, clandestine activities with anti-Communists groups, and coer

cive foreign aid programs, may have alarmed the Soviets and contributed to an intensification of Soviet repres sive action. Such "barkings, growl ings, snappings and occasional

bitings," wrote one State Department officer, would only irritate the Sovi ets without reducing their power (Messer, 302).

Today we do not think of the Cold War as a simple morality play. Nor do traditionalists denounce stridently the revisionists or suggest, as Arthur

M. Schlesinger, Jr. once did, that the whistle should be blown on revision

ism. No, scholars have moved con

siderably in the last fifteen years or so to a far fuller, multi-layered ex

planation of the origins of the Cold War. Now we think less of pinning blame and more about shared respon

sibility. We think less about aggres sion and reaction, and more about

the competitive building of spheres of influence. We think less about who "lost" China and more about Chinese Communist overtures to the United States in 1949 that might have led to an accommodation (Borg; Tucker). We think less about Wash

ington's hesitant steps toward con tainment and more about the early formation of a concept of national se

curity that was global in scope. We think less about a monolithic Com

munism and more about the strains within the Communist world, evident in Soviet relations with Yugoslavia and China in the late 1940s. We think less about attributions of unlim ited Soviet ambitions and more about the exact nature of the Soviet threat. In my own work, especially in On

Every Front: The Making of the Cold War (1979), I have tried to look at the systemic causes of the Cold

War?those characteristics of the in

ternational system, like decoloniza

tion, economic crisis, civil wars, and

power vacuums, that generated post war hostility?while at the same time

giving attention to the fundamental needs and ideas of each power and the tactics it used to pursue its goals.

Finally, it seems that revisionists and traditionalists have come to agree that the United States was imperial.

The debate centers on whether that

imperial exercise of power was self

generated or reactive, offensive or

defensive, pressed or invited. John L. Gaddis, for example, admits that the United States created a postwar empire, but he breaks with revision ists by as serting that Americans did so only at the request of others such as Western Europeans seeking recon

struction aid. Whether defensive or

self-interested, this postwar expan

sion, scholars agree, propelled the United States into an international ac tivism that helped initiate the Cold

War.3

Notes 1 See, for example, works by Feis and

Spanier. 2 U.S. Department of State, Foreign

Relations of the United States, 1950 I,

252(1977). 3 See Herken; Wittner; Gaddis, Strate

gies', Wexler; Kuniholm; Schaller; and

Painter.

List of Sources

Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, the Use of

the Atomic Bomb and the American

Confrontation with Soviet Power. NY:

Simon and Schuster, 1965; rev. ed.

NY: Penguin, 1985.

Bernstein, Barton J., ed. Politics and

Policies of the Truman Administration.

Chicago: Quadrangle Books: 1970.

Borg, Dorothy and Waldo Heinrichs. Un

certain Years: Chinese-American Rela

tions, 1947-1950. NY: Columbia Univ.

Pr., 1980.

Evangelista, Matthew A. "Stalin's Post

war Army Reappraised." International

Security 1 (Winter 1982-83), 110-38. Feis, Herbert. Between War and Peace:

The Potsdam Conference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1960.

_Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin:

The War They Waged and the Peace

They Sought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Univ. Pr., 1957.

_From Trust to Terror: The

Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950.

NY: Norton, 1970.

Gaddis, John L. "The Emerging Post

Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of

the Cold War," Diplomatic History 1

(Summer 1983), 171-204.

_Strategies of Containment: A

Critical Appraisal of Postwar Ameri

can National Security Policy. New

York: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1982.

Gardner, Lloyd C. Architects of Illusion:

Men and Ideas in American Foreign

Policy, 1941-1949. Chicago: Quadran

gle Books, 1970.

Herken, Gregg. The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War,

?945-1949. NY: Knopf, 1981. Kennan, George F. "Overdue Changes in

Our Foreign Policy," Harper's 113

(August 1956), 28. Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The

World and United States Foreign Pol

icy, 1943-1945. NY: Random House, 1968.

_and Joyce Kolko. The Limits of Power: The World and United States

Foreign Policy, 1945-1954. NY: Har

per & Row, 1972.

Kuniholm, Bruce. The Origins of the

Cold War in the Near East: Great

Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran,

Turkey, and Greece. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton Univ. Pr., 1980.

LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and

the Cold War: 1945-1966. NY: Wiley, 1967 (with subs. eds.).

Leffler, Melvyn P. "The American Con

ception of National Security and the

Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945

48." American Historical Review 89

(April 1984), 346-81. Maclsaac, David. "The Air Force and

Strategic Thought, 1945-1951." Work

ing Paper No. 8. International Security Studies Program, Woodrow Wilson

Center, Washington, DC, 1979.

Millis, Walter, ed. The Forrestal Diaries.

NY: Viking Pr., 1951. Painter, David S. Oil and the American

Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, ?941-1954.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1986.

Cfe Continued on p. 18.

Summer 1986 9

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which had entered the post-war world with such confidence, found itself in an age of uncertainty during the early 1950s. Organizational values were

replacing rugged individualism. A

congressional committee would criti cize the sport, while the Supreme Court upheld the reserve clause. Ra cial prejudice continued to plague the

game, and players with briefcases and lawyers demanded a greater role in governing it. Old loyalties seemed

submerged in the search for profits as the Braves left Boston in 1952 for

greener pastures in Milwaukee, and the St. Louis Browns moved to Balti

more a year later. Had baseball, in

deed, succumbed to an age of affluence? Did baseball have "outer direction" only, seeking conformity in greater gate receipts? Was the

Cold War rhetoric of baseball merely meaningless platitudes?

The answer to these questions was

not, as Bob Dylan would later sug gest, blowing in the wind. The Cold

War, McCarthy ism, and the affluent

society of the late 1940s and early 1950s did place considerable strain

on the institution of baseball, and it did find a niche in the organizational revolution and bureaucratic structure

of corporate America. Yet, despite the ideological excesses of individu als like Senator Bricker, baseball did, and still does, define America to some degree. While some baseball officials may have used the Cold War rhetoric to cover up their desire for

profit, to many other Americans

baseball remained a symbol of tradi tional values in a confusing world.

Thus, in a prayer celebrating the re

turn of organized baseball to Peoria, Illinois in 1953, Reverend William

E. Cousins thought baseball analo

gies were essential to explaining the

qualities of the American fighting man. Reverend Cousins asserted:

We are not a military nation, but the spirit of those serving our

country's cause has had all the value of a secret weapon. You

can't beat men who won't give up, who believe that the game isn't over till the last out. You can't

discourage men who keep swing

ing for the fence even after two strikes have been called. You can't

frighten men who will never quit

until God himself pulls them out of the lineup. But perhaps one of the most direct

and honest statements about the sport was made by former P.O.W. Ser

geant Jim W. Richardson, who com mented after attending a contest between the Phillies and Braves on 26 August 1953, "I sat behind the

catcher, and when I ate my first hot

dog with mustard I knew I was really back in the States." While baseball was undergoing fundamental struc tural changes in a more organized so

ciety, the basic rules and tradition of the game remained an oasis for many

Americans in a turbulent world. The investigation of popular sports

such as baseball during the Cold War

may be a very useful strategy for

making the late 1940s and early 1950s come alive. An interest in

sport may lead the student to further

investigate the political, sociological, economic, and diplomatic factors which influence the way Americans

play in the twentieth century. A real ization of the importance of popular culture to the formation and explana tion of American values, as exempli fied by baseball, may encourage students to examine other aspects of

popular culture. Baseball sheds im

portant light on understanding do mestic affairs during the Cold War,

challenges students to explain sym bols and abstractions, and fosters in

dependent research on the role of

popular culture and institutions in American society and history, ?fc

List of Sources

Senzel, Howard. Baseball and the Cold War: Being a Soliloquy on the Necessity of Baseball. NY:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Sporting News. 1947-1954.

Tygiel, Jules. Baseballs Great Ex

periment: Jackie Robinson and His

Legacy. NY: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1983.

Voigt, David Quentin. American Baseball. V. 3, From Postwar Ex

pansion to the Electronic Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Pr., 1983.

CxGebcPO

?? Continued from p. 9.

Paterson, Thomas G., ed. Cold War Crit

ics: Alternatives to American Foreign

Policy in the Truman Years. Chicago:

Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Schaller, Michael. The American Occu

pation of Japan: The Origins of the

Cold War in Asia. NY: Oxford Uni v.

Pr., 1985.

Smith, Gaddis. Dean Acheson. The

American Secretaries of State and

Their Diplomacy, vol. 16. NY: Cooper

Square, 1972.

Spanier, John. American Foreign Policy Since World War II. NY: Praeger,

1960; NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Win

ston, 1985.

Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippman and the

American Century. Boston: Little,

Brown, 1980.

Tucker, Nancy B. Patterns in the Dust:

Chinese-American Relations and the

Recognition Controversy, 1949-1950.

NY: Columbia Univ. Pr., 1983.

U.S. Department of State, Foreign Rela

tions of the United States, 1950. I,

252. Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office, 1977. Wells, Samuel F., Jr. "Sounding the

Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat," International Security 4 (Fall

1979), 116-158. Wexler, Imanuel. The Marshall Plan Re

visited: The European Recovery Pro

gram in Economic Perspective.

Westport, Conn: Greenwood Pr., 1983.

Wittner, Lawrence. American Interven

tion in Greece, 1943-1949. NY: Co

lumbia Univ. Pr., 1982.

Yergin, Daniel. Shattered Peace: The

Origins of the Cold War and the Na

tional Security State. Boston: Hough ton Mifflin, 1977.

Guide to Free Materials The Educators Progressive Service,

Inc. publishes the Elementary Teacher's

Guide to Free Curriculum Materials, a

guide to booklets, pamphlets, maps,

exhibits, films, etc. which various firms

and agencies will send schools, libraries,

and industries without charge. The Guide

covers only the elementary level but does

include a section called '

'Teacher

Reference and Professional Growth

Materials" for other levels. For more

information, contact Educators

Progressive Service, Inc., 214 Center

St., Randolph, WI 53956 or phone I (414) 326-3126.

18 Magazine of History

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