Pop Culture

6 Pages 1556 Words

The Cold War and American Pop-Culture
The influence of the Cold War on American popular culture in the 1950s is very clear. “As true today, popular culture in the 1950s meant primarily movies, television programs, and recorded music as well as fiction, drama, and even fashion and comics.” The Cold War is the name given to the tensions and arms race that occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union in the years following the Second World War. Anti-Communism, and the “red scare” dominated American popular culture, with everyone trying to prove that they were against Communism. The influence that the Cold War had on American popular culture is evident through the popular novels at the time, which usually contained violence towards Communists and portrayed Americans as tough and righteous. Secondly, the Cold War had drastic affects Hollywood largely due to the fact that no other city has such a large influence on all of America. Many people were blacklisted, due to unfounded speculations that they might be in some way associated with the Communist Party. Lastly, the influence that the Cold War had on American popular culture is evident through analysis of the popular music of the 1950s. As a result of the Cold War, American popular culture was largely dominated by anti-communist ideals and subsequently caused mass paranoia throughout the United States
The influence that the cold war was having on America is prevalent through analysis of the literature that was popular throughout the 1950s. Mickey Spillane’s books dominated the fictional bestsellers list of the 1950s, with six of them making the top ten. Historian Stephen Whitfield claims that it was “the detective’s hairy-chested heroics would have made such novels enormously popular even if they had been devoid of any explicit politics, but the overt anti-communism of Spillane’s fiction engraved it with the signature of the period.” Overall it is evident t...