25 Cold War America

1945–1963

Despite the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II, a “cold war” of words and ideas rapidly emerged in the immediate wake of that global conflict. Beginning with the Truman administration, American policymakers increasingly viewed the Soviet Union as a hostile force committed to the worldwide expansion of its anticapitalist and atheistic, communist ideology. How best to counter Soviet aggression became the leading policy debate in the first decades of the Cold War. The urgency of addressing the Soviet menace led to the creation of the national security state, the infrastructure within the federal government created to gather information about Soviet intentions worldwide and to orchestrate the American response. Fears of communist infiltration of the federal government by spies and “fellow travelers,” those sympathetic to the communist cause, resulted in a new Red Scare led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations into alleged communist activity brought him both enormous popularity and eventual scorn and disgrace. Though the McCarthy persecutions petered out in the mid-1950s, Cold War anxieties persisted, shaping a culture shadowed by the fear of a nuclear cloud mushrooming over the liberty skies of America.