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Cold War’s Impact on American Life
As John David Skrentny points out, the Cold War helped to remove some of the obstacles that prevented African Americans from obtaining their civil rights in the 20th century. The Communists of the Soviet Union used American racism as a cudgel with which to browbeat America for its hypocritical values and so-called freedom. America was essentially forced to respond by adopting a more liberal stance towards equal rights and to pursue a policy and culture of desegregation.
Middle class white Americans were shaped by the Cold War in other ways: rather than open up for them an avenue of social advancement as it did for African Americans, many middle class white Americans became fearful and paranoid about the Red Menace, and they turned to leaders like Senator Joe McCarthy for help in uncovering Communists in the government and in Hollywood. This led to the era of McCarthyism and the persecution of people just for having sympathies with the Communist party or for not giving up names to the government of people suspected of being a Communist. The threat of nuclear war also frightened many middle class white Americans, especially in the 1960s as a standoff between the US and Soviet-backed Cuba threatened to take the world to the brink of all-out nuclear war. Kennedy stated in his 1962 speech that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba represented “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas” (Kennedy). The difference for white Americans and African Americans was that white Americans lived in fear during the Cold War, while African Americans saw it for what it was: an opportunity for them to leverage American insecurities and concern for its own image to their advantage and push in a public way for equal rights.
References
Kennedy, John F. “Speech, 22 October 1962.” https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcubanmissilecrisis.html
Skrentny, John David. \"The effect of the Cold War on African-American civil rights: America and the world audience, 1945-1968.\" Theory and Society 27.2 (1998): 237-285.
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