Cold War

Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world
disarmament – and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union
adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them to
do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude – as
individuals and as a Nation – for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And
every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and
wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward – by examining his own
attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the
course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home. President John
F. Kennedy, American University Speech, June 10, 1963 The Cold War was a time in
American History during the twentieth century where the Communist nations were
fighting against the non-Communist nations. However, the main countries
involved, or the ones leading the two sides were the United States and Russia.

The United States led the fight against Communist nations, like Russia. But
these intense rivalries didn’t just go on in the type of government that
should be used or in who could develop the most advanced and most powerful
nuclear weapon of the time. This rivalry went into the culture of American
societies. The Russians were always being viewed as the toughest rival and the
team to beat according to the US. It is similar to how teams think of the
defending champions in a sport. The team playing the defending champions wants
to come out hyped up and with their “A-game” every time they are competing
with them. Another impact it had on the American society was how people started
acting and thinking. In many of the movies and television shows of the time,
most people wouldn’t have noticed, but the directors and producers were hiding
subliminal messages in them. Some of them depicting how awful the Russians were
or how supreme the Americans were. But was American society affected by the Cold
War, or was America just trying to make their society better to show it off to
the other countries? Basically, did America’s way of life and economy during
the cold war improve because they wanted it to show it off or was it a
necessity? The Cold War did affect the American’s way of life. America was a
young nation and it was just beginning to develop into a dominant country. It
first really just established itself as a world power during the two world wars.

Therefore, the cold war was a time in which Americans were trying to get a name
for themselves by showing how great, life in their country was. Shows like Leave
It to Beaver and Father Knows Best portrayed the stereotypical American
families. Even though everyone knows that there is no such thing as a perfect
family, people still enjoyed watching these types of shows. Commercials, or
shows like I Love Lucy, showing the stereotypical woman or housewife in the
kitchen were another way of showing things off. It is really very difficult to
always own the latest models of things coming out. So a woman in a kitchen with
all the new appliances is really unlikely. This was another way of showing off
to other countries how life was or wasn’t. However, the show I Love Lucy,
mainly showed how much freedom a woman had when her husband wasn’t home. Lucy
constantly did foolish things that weren’t exactly the ways women were
supposed to have been behaving. Once again, the United States was portraying how
great life was in America compared to other countries. The majority of the
television shows during the 1950s showed no poverty, death, ethnic mixing, or
racial tension. It just presented the “perfect world.” Juxtaposed, it could
be argued that the Cold War didn’t help shape the American society. American
life could have just formed like how it was supposed to happen; like human
nature. When the men all came back from World War II, many women lost their jobs
and weren’t as active as they were during the time of WWII. The jobs were all
given back to the men, and women were once again treated very delicately. They
went back to their old ways of life when a woman’s life wasn’t supposed to
be strenuous. That then caused the emergence of the “in-the-house-all-day”
housewife. The idea of the housewife