State at War: The Domestic Consequences of Foreign Entanglements in the Early Cold War

This paper examines the domestic repercussions of the historic international commitments made by the U.S. during and after WWII. At root, these commitments entailed a reconfiguration of sovereignty, citizenship and national interest. This reconfiguration helps explain the social politics of anti-communism, which dominated domestic life in the U.S. throughout the postwar period. Between 1941 and 1950, as a direct consequence of its role in history's greatest and most global war, the U.S. forged permanent entangling alliances with major European powers; it framed, joined and led a nascent form of world government; and it embarked on a wholesale re-engineering of leading European and Asian societies (most dramatically, rewriting the constitutions of W. Germany and Japan, reviving and unifying European capitalism, instilling American-style capitalism in Japan, rebuilding roads and other decimated infrastructure on both continents). These represented profound reconfigurations of sovereignty, for the U.S. and for its allies. At the same time, WWII and the cold war propelled the nationalization of American citizenship (what would eventually become the rights revolution), although this partial and gradual process was centered first and foremost on the "first citizens," the GIs. The tensions produced by the simultaneous expansion of social citizenship and globalization of U.S. sovereignty required a resolution at the grassroots that would reintegrate the social politics unleashed by WWII into a coherent national project. A revanchist resolution to this problem was found in anti-communism, which purged the nation of "subversive" scapegoats in order to make palatable the unprecedented requirements of a permanent national security state, while establishing ideological, racial and gendered boundaries around the newly elevated status of national citizenship. I plan to demonstrate this by examining attitudes, debates, political controversies and electoral realignments formed in response to the major international commitments of the era.