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... the House of American Activities, in which he tried suspected communists. The whole country went Communist crazy. His main idea was that the real basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immorality... (Gorn 214) People were paranoid and many peoples lives were destroyed. This lasted until McCarthy died in the late fifties. On the domestic front, the Cold War helped the Soviet Union entrench its military-bureaucratic ruling class in power, and it gave the US a way to compel its population to subsidize high-tech industry and become new innovators of technology at the same time.
One primary example of this was when Nixon meet Khrushchev in an American Kitchen exhibition in Moscow and they both debated that the strength of a country should be based on the living comforts and appliances that the citizens own. The Russian responded to everything Nixon had to say with the statement that, These things are not necessary for life... they are merely gadgets. (May 146). It wasn't easy to sell all that to the domestic populations because they felt comfort was power. The cold war also shaped the roles of families and individuals and how they should do their part to not allow the spread of communism. During World War II, many women who had never worked outside the home before joined the labor force when male laborers went off to war.
This created the perception that social relations between men and women had changed sharply after World War II. In the late 1940 s and 1950 s, American society attempted to address these "social disruptions, " while at the same time they attempted to address the deepening Cold War. In "Explosive Issues: Sex, Women and the Bomb, " Elaine Tyler May discusses the ways in which the Cold War policy of containment -- developed to deal with what U. S. policy makers believed to be Soviet "expansionism" -- influenced domestic affairs. May argues that Americans equated the atomic threat to American society with the perceived threat of female sexuality to the American family.
Thus, while the State Department tried to contain the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, Americans at home moved to contain women within the domestic sphere. The modern family would, presumably, tame fears of atomic holocaust, and tame women as well (May 99). Throughout the novel May explains how the men that came back from the war deserved to be treated with open-arms and the women who were working in the factories should go back to the kitchen and do their responsibilities at home. The dynamics of a family, according from a male perspective, was that women had to keep the house on safe guard and the only real training they needed was to cook and raise the children. An article in Ladies Home Journal in 1949 quoted; Many young men find that they can do much better work if they get the girl out of their dreams and into their kitchen (May 69).
The idea of education was considered useless and once again women were being even more repressed, but with that in mind, according to the first appendix in Mays novel, the education level in women had risen from 15 % of women attending some college to nearly 25 % in less than a decade in the war, but it was obviously not enough. With women having all these dilemmas of being tied down and fear from the whole population that the USSR was becoming a large threat with their political views of the world and their arsenal, a sexual revolution was born. This first began with the music that was sweeping the nation, doo-wop and rock and roll started to become a big factor and for the first time songs began to be more sexual and perverse and that is why people started saying the youth was becoming corrupt due to listening to the devils music. Then, at the same time at the end of the 1940 s and early 1950 s the baby boom came into full power, the population skyrocketed and forms of birth control began increasing as well. The number of birth control clinics went up from 55 in the 1930 s to over 800 in 1942 (May 132).
When it came to the social views many individuals were given the ethics to wait until you got married to have sex, but that was not the case. Premarital sex had risen in drastic fashion and families began to disown young daughters that got pregnant before tying the knot. Many parents sent their daughters off to live with some distant relatives until the child was born and then put it up for adoption or the only other choice that was left was to marry the individual that impregnated you. This also caused the social flair of divorce that was also increasing with the amount of young citizens getting married with not knowing what they want or because they were forced into marriage.
The final domestic problem that was ignited by the Cold War was how was a man supposed to act. The idea that we could be at war at any time, we needed our men to be strong and tough. The idea of a mommas boy became very popular during this time and many people were trying to promote the idea that sissy boys do not make it far. With the idea that men could become way too effeminate, the notion of homosexuality was linked to that. If a person is a sissy, well then they are homosexual and that therefore makes them a sexual predator as May explains in Chapter 4 talking about people views in general. The rising amount of homophobia came into existence in this time, there was a need for real men not pansies or sexual deviance and programs began to make men more manly, these were just some of the chaos that was brought about with containment with in the nation.
There were also ideas of persecuting and executing those who had communists beliefs and were labeled as traitors and the fact that all blacks were communist because they felt that the USSR was at least treating their citizens equally no matter what. The principle idea of people taking the initiative to all these ideas was in fear, but at the same time it what was they had felt was necessary for this nation to avoid communism. Later, when Kennedy took into power and we were in the climax of the Cold War, he said it best, And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country (Gorn 219). In conclusion, the Containment Policy won out in the end and caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, this process would still go into the 1980 s, but the US also prevented many countries from turning communist during the next couple of decades. Despite its many flaws with domestic policies, the Containment Policy eventually achieved its goal - the destruction of communism.
Only three communist countries remain today, China, North Korea, and Cuba. The stoppage that we had with our containment foreign policies can be considered victorious, but when it came to how our women were treated, homosexuals, blacks and young teens that got married we lost the battle and added more of a scare than was really needed. The irony you can say was that during all this time our country was trying to contain people and make them believe a certain way, one would think we were as communist as the USSR at the time.
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