Social effects of the Cold War
Arms Race• ICBM• Sputnik• Bay of Pigs• Cuban Missile
Crisis
McCarthyism
McCarthyism
• Politicians, FBI, educators, social commentators warn of communist spies
• Senator McCarthy - quest to expose communists - liberal, radical, behaving in “odd” way - thousands lose jobs for once being a communist– Conform to a socially sanctioned way of life
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The Civil Rights Movement
• Irony of American “freedom,” exploited by USSR propaganda– weakness of capitalism – poverty, segregation, voting
rights, extralegal violence• Influence of Gandhi on Martin Luther King Jr. • Gradual successes:– Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954, against school
segregation– Rosa Parks, Montgomery Alabama, 1955
Feminism• Families provided best defense to Communism - Women stay
home and rear patriotic children, as opposed to working, like in the Soviet Union
• Women treated as second class citizens, unhappy with lack of choice/freedom
• More married women worked during cold war than WWII - feeling of shame not living up to standards
• Women inspired by Communist women, independence movements in Asia and Africa from colonial powers - equal rights
• Language of Marxism and anti-colonialism - oppressed class; against male colonization of female bodies; women’s liberation
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Cold War Countercultural Protests
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb– Critique of nuclear power policies
• Massive anti-Vietnam protests• Rock and Roll as counterculture• Watergate Scandal (1972-1974)– President Nixon orders illegal wiretaps, discovered
and forced to resign 1974
Fall of the Berlin Wall
Reagan and Gorbachev