THE COLD WAR AND THE RISE OF CONSPIRACY CULTURE

The evolution of conspiracy theory in the cultural climate in the United States can be traced using screen productions and Washington politics as touchstones. Followed chronologically, one sees how screen media have both reflected and shaped the cultural milieu in which often traumatic events and political controversies have been interpreted with increasing cynicism. Themes similar to conspiracy theory occasionally, though not frequently, appeared in movies before the mid-twentieth century. In the years just before the late 1940s, conspiracy theory had not been a sustained theme in American movies. Depression-era filmmaking of the 1930s sometimes addressed the subject of organized crime, which has conspiratorial undertones, but movies of that era often dealt with genre themes. Popular moviemaking frequently aimed to give audiences an escape from the realities of the grim economy and its effects. These films seldom revealed the paranoiac sense that fueled conspiracy theory films in the following years. The coming of World War II changed Hollywood’s focus to some extent, prompting more pictures that would either directly or indirectly bolster the war effort. But there was little demand for stories about conspiracy, except perhaps in the narrow sense of espionage, since the world was engaged in a battle with dark forces that were out in the open. Indeed, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Hollywood mobilized with the rest of society. It often produced movies to bolster the mood of Americans as they faced the grueling hardships of global war. When not pursuing this path, Hollywood continued to make movies that were extensions of prewar themes. For the most part, movies at this time aimed simply to entertain with light, escapist tales. At times, movies did look at less attractive aspects of American life, as in film noir pictures such as Double Indemnity (1944). Such works, however, aimed their attention more at corrupted individuals than at large-scale, malicious scheming. When cabals and plots appeared on screen, it was usually as part of a straightforward portrayal of good and evil. The fear and paranoia that were central elements of conspiracy theory narratives after World War II were seldom seen.

In the years after World War II, a more modern version of conspiracy theory emerged as a forceful presence in American screen culture. The postwar rise of the conspiracy theory theme reflected not only changes in popular culture, but also the new political realities of the era. At the war’s end, the world changed abruptly, and film studios looked for ways to keep audiences interested in the movies. The Great Depression was a memory, and there was no longer a need to support a war effort. Hollywood looked for new themes amid the many new distractions that competed for audience attention. Although previous genres did not vanish, Hollywood searched for new subjects. It was a task that would become increasingly more important as television, still in its infancy in the late 1940s, emerged as a powerful new medium in the following decade.
After the war, the United States looked different, and the American people had a new outlook. At the end of the war, the nation was, indeed, jubilant. As a new world dawned across the United States, the future looked bright. It was hardly the kind of world in which conspiracy would seem a worry. The right side had won the war, and it had done so convincingly. And unlike the case in many of the countries in Europe and much of Asia, which were burdened with the enormously costly task of rebuilding nations that had been savaged by the war, economic life in the United States seemed good. As returning servicemen rejoined civilian society, they flooded the workplace and the marketplace. This helped recreate postwar America in a new image. The baby boom was one signal of a new prosperity. In its wake, suburbs, superhighways, and consumerism came to dominate much of American life. The seeds of many social and economic changes were sown in this era, but the most tumultuous of these changes would take many years to reach maturity. The immediate mood seemed positive and hopeful. The war was over; life could return to normalcy. Or so it seemed. In fact, somber changes in international politics had been set into motion, and the effects of these were about to manifest themselves throughout American life. By the time the new international situation came to be fully appreciated by the American public under the new rubric of the “Cold War, the stage was already set for the emergence of a new climate of fear and paranoia that would undercut the veneer of exuberance that clad the burgeoning consumer society. A modern age of conspiracy theory was about to begin. Soon, Hollywood responded to this undercurrent of paranoia, sometimes explicitly and sometimes appearing in the guise of genre films. Within a few years, movies with conspiracy theory themes began to appear in American theaters with remarkable frequency. The forces that caused a sudden surge in conspiracy theory movies took shape in the late 1940s, in the midst of new political contexts that emerged in postwar America. Although a detailed examination is beyond the scope of this book, it is useful to recall some of the highlights from that era—events that so profoundly influenced American culture of the time and had an especially pronounced effect on Hollywood. During the Cold War years in the United States, the fear of conspiracy sometimes overshadowed many of the more positive aspects of contemporary life.20 The Cold War environment had not created the growing fear of conspiracy. But the new bipolar world—in which the democracy-oriented nations gathered around the United States were pitted against the communist world led by the Soviet Union—brought it to new heights. The Cold War was a new global type of conflict in which the two poles struggled to assert their dominance in international affairs. Competing for empire was hardly a new phenomenon, but the postwar context was powerfully shaped by a new and fearsome reality. Humans now possessed the technology of nuclear weapons and soon would have the capability not only of destroying their enemies, but also of extinguishing all human life on the planet. In the United States, this new reality generated enormous anxiety. It was a world in which fear was not irrational, but instead seemed a form of realism. The ways in which American culture processed those fears and anxieties, however, were sometimes extreme.

Thus, in some ways the exhilaration that the Americans felt after World War II was short-lived. Almost immediately, Americans exhibited a new apprehension about the Soviet Union, which tempered their elation at winning the war that had just ended. Although the United States had maintained an uneasy alliance with the Soviets during World War II, the communist behemoth now presented a major new threat that almost erased this memory. The growing rivalry between the United States and USSR, which would last for the next half-century, produced a long series of unsettling events and crises, assuring that tensions remained high. The mood of fear and anxiety started to have a profound effect on the American consciousness. The first alarm bells rang for many Americans when the Soviets essentially annexed much of Eastern Europe just after the war. (Soviet-sphere states nominally maintained their national identities, but it was clear they were under the control of the behemoth Soviet empire.) Behind the Iron Curtain, Josef Stalin presided over a regime so brutal that even the Soviet leaders who came after him would distance themselves from its excesses. Although the USSR paid a heavy price in death and destruction during the war, Stalin was determined to rebuild his nation and bring it to the center of the world stage. Accordingly, he engaged in a massive re-strengthening of the USSR’s military-industrial machine. A central part of this project focused on the Soviet quest for nuclear-weapon technology, which they reasoned would place the USSR on par with the United States, wiping out the American military advantage. It did not take long for the Soviets to achieve this goal. On August 29, 1949, the USSR shocked the world when it detonated its first atomic bomb. The dynamics of international politics changed overnight. The significance of this development can hardly be overestimated. The confidence and sense of security that Americans felt so long as their country was the only nuclear power vanished with the realization that a seemingly unfriendly force had now learned the atom bomb’s secrets. Soon, citizens throughout the Western world realized how dangerous the world had become. They feared a frightening, potentially apocalyptic future. The revelation that the Soviet Union had acquired an atomic bomb reverberated throughout Washington and around the world. This startling new reality was hard for Americans to accept. Almost immediately, espionage and conspiracy were suspected. How else, it was reasoned, could the Soviets have so quickly developed the nuclear technology that only the United States had possessed?
In fact, this new development had been years in the making. Although it was not widely known at the time, the Nazi war effort had made substantial progress toward the creation of its own nuclear weaponry. By the end of the war, German scientists who worked in this and other advanced military technology programs were highly prized by the United States and the USSR. In the final days of World War II, both the Soviets and the Americans engaged in frantic efforts to round up these Nazi scientists and technologists so that they could be put to work in their own military research programs, especially those focusing on rocketry and nuclear weapons.21 Once identified and placed in the service of the war’s victors, both the U.S. and Soviet military programs benefited from the knowledge that the one-time Nazi scientists brought. This was only part of the story of the Soviet atomic bomb, however, and even this much was not well known to the American public. Instead, as Americans sought to understand how their nation’s new archrival had acquired nightmarish weapons, attention quickly focused on the possibility that traitors had passed secret atomic knowledge to the Soviets. The suspicion that communist sympathizers had compromised American nuclear security led to a vigorous investigation. Although some details are still disputed, formerly classified Soviet documents make clear that in fact the USSR did make concerted efforts to steal American nuclear secrets. A refugee German scientist named Karl Fuchs, who had contributed to the Manhattan Project while working for the British, passed some American nuclear secrets to the Soviets. When discovered and confronted, Fuchs implicated others who had been involved in delivering the classified information to Soviet hands. A so-called “courier” named Harry Gold was identified. Through that connection, American intelligence agents identified other coconspirators, the most infamous of whom were the married couple, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They were soon arrested and tried under the glare of the national news media. The court proceedings were a sensation, riveting public attention. Swiftly convicted, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death in 1951. (Both died in the electric chair two years later.) Public fears were partially calmed, but the convictions suggested to the public that there were, in fact, conspirators in their midst. Fear and anxiety did not seem to be unreasonable paranoia, but the legitimate response to a threat that was all too real.

This type of event set off widespread fears of Soviet infiltration into American life. Congress became caught up in the mood of the day. Congress had already begun to investigate “un-American activities,” and now such investigations were taken up with renewed vigor. In highly publicized hearings, both the House of Representatives and Senate zealously aimed to flush out potential traitors in America’s midst. It was the beginning of an anti-communist campaign that later became the hallmark of much of the 1950s. The most well-known and zealous individual involved was Joseph Mc-Carthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin.22 McCarthy, who is so closely associated with this pervasive political and cultural phenomenon that it is often called McCarthyism, began a spirited fight against the Red Menace, as the communist threat was sometimes called. (Although McCarthy is remembered as the most visible figure in the anticommunist fervor, many other members of Congress shared his obsession with a perceived communist enemy.) The search for the unseen enemy was to become so vigorous, however, by the mid-1950s, some people started to think it was a witch hunt. McCarthy had been honing his anticommunist public stance for several years.23 In a 1950 speech, for example, he revealed how seriously he feared what he saw as the communist threat. He suggested the steps he would soon undertake in his efforts to stop it. Speaking to a group in West Virginia in February of that year, he held up a piece of paper, saying “I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”McCarthy’s later televised appearances in Congressional hearings made a fascinating spectacle. The immediacy of the still-young broadcast media made the proceedings more sensational than ever before. Called to testify before Congress, witnesses sat helplessly as McCarthy railed against all those who he thought had communist sympathies. Using threats and public condemnation, he browbeat those testifying, demanding that they reveal the names of others who had ever been associated with communism or socialism in any way. At first, the public applauded these efforts. Since socialist political groups had been fairly common in the Depression era, there were many people who had some previous association with socialism or communism, however faint, in their pasts. Once revealed, however, the accused were ostracized by society, sometimes losing their jobs, their reputations in their communities, and even the affection of their families.

Hollywood had already been a target of those looking to flush out communists. The movie business had been regarded as a potential threat to the American way of life by some people even before the anticommunist fervor of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, then, the film industry came under the glare of the House Un-American Activities Committee as early as 1947. It is widely remembered that actors, directors, screenwriters, and others who stood accused of communist leanings were subjected to the notorious “blacklist” practices that essentially cut them off from their livelihoods.24 Less remembered
is the fact that some Hollywood insiders cooperated with the search for communists and sympathizers. Those cooperating included Ronald Reagan and Robert Taylor. A fear of conspiracy at this time was not, then, a product of Hollywood’s imagination. Like much of the rest of the country, Hollywood was caught up in the complicated web of fear and paranoia that fueled the conspiracy theory inclinations of that time.
Elsewhere in the world, the end of World War II set the stage for several nationalist struggles that had a major impact on the United States. These sometimes ignited into full-fledged warfare, often pitting communist revolutionaries against governments that had been more sympathetic to American interests. Events in Asia fueled Cold War fears. For many Americans and their allies, these developments seemed to suggest that the communist threat was a global phenomenon. In China, Mao Zedong’s communist forces successfully overran the national government led by Chiang Kai-shek, driving his government into exile on the island of Taiwan. The two leaders remained bitter enemies for the remaining decades of their lives, both claiming that their administrations represented the legitimate government of China. Neither the communist People’s Republic of China nor the more democratic Republic of China consented to recognize the other entity. Although the dispute did not evolve into open warfare, the tense situation continued into the following century. Soon after the rise of the communist regime in China, it seemed as though much of this region could fall to the communists. In neighboring Korea, the situation was just as volatile. As World War II ended, Korea found itself split into halves. With the expulsion of the Japanese invaders who had traumatized the country during the war, the northern half of Korea came under the influence of the Soviet Union and China, while the southern region came under the influence of the United States and its allies. The dividing line between the two regions was the thirty-eighth parallel.
In the mid-1950s, just months after the communist victory in mainland China, the leaders of North Korea felt emboldened enough to launch an armed assault against the south. Although the North Koreans regarded this as a war of liberation, the regime in the south saw it as nothing less than a hostile invasion. Soon, the country was embroiled in a bitter war, in which North Korea was aided by China and USSR, which had newly acquired the status of a nuclear power. Aiding South Korea was the United States, which mustered a contingent of forces from the fledgling United Nations to fend off the attack.

Conspiracy theory is still a shorthand way to see the world, but it has been so frequently invoked that its power as an explanation has become diluted. For those people seeking to sound an alarm bell about what they think is an actual large-scale conspiracy, the very label “conspiracy theory” chips away at credibility. Now interpreted as a metaphor, the suggestion of conspiracy theory as a literal phenomenon often receives little consideration.
Conspiracy theories about many different subjects abound. They offer explanations about the coordinated scheming of mysterious forces that try to control worldly affairs. But the cultural idea of conspiracy theory, as a metaphor for the world of experience, has largely replaced these more literal ideas. Indeed, frequent and casual use of the label has stripped the idea of most of its literal meaning. Still, it has been a durable concept in popular culture and politics. Undoubtedly, future screen productions will continue to reflect changes in ideas about conspiracy theory. How it will be incarnated in the future remains to be seen.