Rediscovering America: Cold War in the 1950s

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Rediscovering America. Understanding the ideas, history and faith that shaped a nation. This is The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio.

Drew Mariani (0:25)

Well, thank you for spending part of your afternoon with me. It's always good to be here with you and explore life. I always love these segments, too. Taking a look at really our nation's history and helping you to rediscover America, understand the ideas, the history, the faith that shaped our nation. Coming up in a moment, Dr. Susan Hansen, who's been our resident guide to understanding America, will be joining me. She, of course, is a professor, associate professor of history at the University of Dallas, and we spend every week, every two weeks, she helps us dive into many of these issues. And I want to look a little bit deeper today at the Cold War. I don't know how much you remember or know about that, but when you think about the 1950s, maybe you picture Eisenhower or, it was an interesting time for America, right? We had these booming suburbs, television sets were relatively new, right? America seemed confident about itself. You know, we had just come out of the Second World War.

It was really an enchanted time for America, but beneath all that prosperity, there was an extraordinary struggle, right? There was a nuclear standoff. It had to be a terrifying time as well. And we had the Soviet Union, and we were in the deeper battle over ideas. There was an ideological war now being waged. And while America was confronting communism overseas, there was a young William F. Buckley Jr. who was asking whether somebody was already changing inside, something was changing inside America's universities. And let's dive into it, all right?

Let's explore this aspect. And we got a lot more to get into as well. It's a delight to have Dr. Hanssen with me. Doctor, good afternoon. Thanks for joining me.

Susan Hanssen (2:14)

Thank you so much. It's great to be on.

Drew Mariani (2:17)

I love your take on, maybe set the scene for us, right? We can start there.

America is post-World War II right now, and it seems to be booming, but there was this battle of ideologies. But set the scene, and how real the fear of communism was for an ordinary American, how real the fear of nuclear war might have been, and take us through this interesting chapter in US history.

Susan Hanssen (2:46)

So yes, the Cold War really takes off right after World War II. And I think it is really good for us to reflect on the fact that young people these days, the young people who are in college right now, they can barely remember the COVID lockdowns, right? They don't have any memory of 9-11. They don't have any memory of the end of the Cold War in 1989 with the coming down of the Berlin Wall, the end of the evil empire. They don't remember John Paul II.

I was actually asked once by a young reporter who meant well. They were covering one of the papal conclaves. And I said, well, kind of talking about Pope Francis and comparing his papacy to the two previous papacies, and I referred to Benedict XVI and JP II. And the person said, what is JP II?

What is, right? Not who is, but what is.

SPEAKER_4 (3:50)

What is JP II, right?

Susan Hanssen (3:51)

So I think that it's very important for us to realize that the young people who are in college these days, who are being swayed by the ideology of democratic socialism, that they're kind of buying into this critique of America from a radical Marxist communist perspective, that they don't know the history of the Cold War, and that that's partly because our schools have not taught it, have not taught it from a proper perspective, but also because those of us who have lived through it, need to remember to tell our stories because sometimes, there's that lived history that gets lost in being passed on to the next generation. So, you know, we were coming out of World War II, and we talked about this a couple of weeks back, that even though Marxism had been around since Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto all the way back in 1848, trying to draw together all of the different revolutionary movements in Europe into a single worldwide revolution. So Karl Marx's ideas had been around since 1848, and the Church herself had responded. Pope Leo XIII had written his encyclical letter, Rerum Novarum, responding to the errors of socialism. He admitted that there are many sort of new movements in politics and economics that need the Church's attention, that need a Christian response, but he was very clear that socialism was not the Christian response, right? The destruction of the natural communities of the family and the Church and the nation are not the Christian response, right? It is God, the Creator, who gave us our own human nature and gave us those natural communities. Those ideas had been around for a long time. Of course, they had come into power in the communist regime in Russia in 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution. There had been some response to communism and communist ideas in the American context in the 1920s and 30s. Even as far back as Grover Cleveland, there was mention of the danger and the threat of socialism in America.