Recruitment in the nursery: The Cold War mobilization of children

The ideological recruitment and the mobilization of children for practical Cold War duties represented the logical extreme of the recent trend toward the participation of citizens to both wage and suffer modern total wars. Always an appropriate oxymoronic label for an ambiguous era--which every United States' president vaguely defined as a period of "neither peace nor war"--the Cold War still defies attempts to place it in historical context. This analysis of the early Cold War period (1947-1963) begins by de-emphasizing the extent to which the Cold War represented a time of peace. This interpretation, instead, follows from the assumption that the superpowers, in many important respects, behaved as if the Cold War was a real, an actual, a total war. Far from being a military or strictly political history of the Cold War, however, this dissertation focuses on children as a lens to look at the degree to which the war-mindedness of the Cold War era permeated and transformed American culture. Detailing the ubiquitous presence of the Cold War then serves as a springboard to help explain the youth rebellion after the mid 1960s, the collapse of a United States' consensus Cold War world view, and the polarization of American society that followed. Although the inclusion of children onto the center stage of history will provide a unique intellectual perspective to look at the Cold War era, this approach will generate a certain amount of productive controversy. Most historians do not classify the Cold War as an actual war. To be sure, in many important respects, the Cold War differed from the other world wars of the twentieth century. After all, the Cold War never erupted into an exchange of nuclear weapons or an engagement on the battlefield between the United States and the Soviet Union. But a stress on the Cold War's ambiguity and uniqueness is less instructive than an examination of its resemblance to every other total war in modern history.