Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War

Abstract

This collection explores the Cold War battleground of print media. The editors Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner have compiled an intriguing mix of essays intended “to reflect the power and complexity of print culture” of the era (p. 19). They include analyses of American and Soviet propaganda efforts to deploy books as weapons as well as examinations of a popular newspaper comic strip, cookbooks, travel guides, literary magazines, and art criticism. Although print media was censored, it served, unlike film and television, as the most likely medium for dissent from samizdat to antiwar pamphlets. This investigation of official and unofficial Cold War messages reveals the range of competing narratives of national identity in an age of superpower rivalry. According to both radicals and conservatives, the American republic was in danger during the Cold War. To save it, New Left organizers and anticommunist conservatives turned to education through pamphlets and books. Kristin Mathews shows how the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) challenged government control of knowledge by adopting a decentralized policy of pamphleteering that equated reading with participatory democracy. Laura Jane Gifford analyzes efforts by Cold War conservatives to alert readers to communist deception and infiltration through books published by small presses. Using alternatives to mainstream commercial publishing, activists on the Left and the Right believed in the power of print to reach and inspire “the people.”

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