"War in the Living Room"

Commentary by Lary May

Professor of History and American Studies

University of Minnesota

Introduction:

Our two paper presenters, Thomas Doherty and Tony Williams will show the impact of the Korean War on the mass media. Both implicitly demonstrate that the police action presented Americans at home with a central dilemma. On the one hand, President Truman had committed troops to the defense of South Korea by harking back to the lessons of World War II. Applying the lesson that the democracies must stop the spread of the totalitarians, the President reinstituted the military draft and launched a military commitment to thwart the spread of communism around the world. It was this war, in other words, the committed the United States to a global crusade. As one of Truman’s advisors noted that it was "the Korean War, and not World War II that made us into a world military-political power."

At the center of that transformation was the effort of the Truman administration to utilize the mass media to evoke patriotic feelings in support of these new departures. in American history. Why the mass media loomed so large in these calculations was not hard to find. As I showed in my recent book The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way, the mass media was central to the making of a new nationality for the postwar era. Symbolic of that shift was the leader charged with orchestrating Hollywood’s liaison with the government in the new war. Before his arrival in the film capital, Erik Johnston had served as a reformist president of the United States Chamber of Commerce and as President Roosevelt’s business ambassador to the Soviet Union. During the Korean War he moved from Hollywood to lead economic agencies to manage the Koran War at home and later he headed agencies in the Eisenhower presidency that were devoted to economic development of the Third World.

Johnston was thus one of the established elites who linked the mass media to national policy. And like his fellow leaders in what we now call the "greatest generation" he had a clear view of what had gone wrong in the past and what the United States must do in the future to insure its prosperity and safety. Like his mentor, Henry Luce of Time Magazine, Johnston saw that World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor had taught the people key lessons. In the past he believed the people had mistakenly identified democracy, equality and fraternity with opposition to both monopoly capitalism and international involvements. But Johnson saw that the attack on Pearl Harbor had demanded that the nation become unified and militarily strong to keep the peace. At home he saw that the war had restored class unity and ended the depression. Seeking to revive that elan in the Korean War era, he noted that Hollywood had once again a role to play for "there is not one of us who isn’t aware that the motion picture industry is the most powerful medium for influencing of people that man has ever built."

In other words, the advent of the Korean War provided a golden opportunity for Johnson and the mass media to promote a unified American victory culture., for as the trade press duly noted "Hollywood was going to war again." To accomplish that task, Johnson was also a militant anti communist at home and abroad. In his view cinematic images that were hostile to capitalism and the struggle against the "Reds" were now seen as subversive. With the assistance of the House Un American Activities Committee, he noted that the Korean War justified a purge of radicalism from labor unions and film making itself. He thus sanctioned the influx of Central Intelligence Agency officers to censor films as well as the Academy Awards. He also instituted censorship guidelines to present American films that would present a positive image of national life in foreign nations.

Little wonder that Johnson responded enthusiastically when President Truman called film producers to the White House to promote the war in Asia Under his guidance, film studios and television networks cooperated with the Defense Department to spur the fighting spirit. What we

will explore in the following presentations will be the response of popular artists to the Koran War. Our initial paper by Thomas Doherty, Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University will address the involvement of television shows in recording the impact of the conflict, followed by Tony Williams, Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, who will focus his paper on films and comics books that presented a conflicted view of the Korean War in the popular arts.

Concluding Remarks

Both of these fine papers compel us to recognize the peculiar, dualistic quality of the Korean War. As we have heard in our opening sessions with Bruce Cummings, and then Melvyn Leffler today, the aim of President Truman and the military was to thwart the spread of communism in Asia. In the aftermath they then launched military and economic treaties around the world. Yet if we assume that the mass media is a barometer of public opinion, it was clear that a Korean War signaled a divided mind among the public at the grass roots, providing us with an insight into why the conflict was "forgotten."

To begin with, state leaders and anti communist saw the mass arts not simply as a means to reflect the war, but to mobilize American symbols to generate popular support for the conflict. As such they saw that in modern states the mass media is central to creating nationality, or the "imaginary community" that binds groups together into a common cause. Yet in the Koran War this was no easy task. Against the backdrop of the class conflicts of the New Deal and hostility to internationalism, anti communist movie makers envisaged that the mass media would help create an Americanism rooted in class consensus, liberal capitalism and a struggle against international communism. Yet as Korean War films, comic books and television shows appeared they showed that artists and audiences were reluctant to follow. Television shows, comics and films of the Korean War often dramatized a widespread sense of tragedy, despair and hostility to the war itself. In other words, despite mobilizing the myth of World War II as a victory lesson to be emulated, the public failed to support "Truman’s War" in politics or public opinion.

At this crossroads, we can also advance some hypothesis to explain why the Korean War was also the "forgotten war." Or to put it another way, one might ask how pervasive was the "Cold War identity" that scholars uncritically assume pervaded the late forties and fifties? It was clear that within Hollywood anti communists like Erik Johnson and Ronald Reagan sought to purge left wing influences from both unions and film making, forging a postwar American Way rooted in classless ideals, and a private consumer oriented home. Yet when that elan was yoked to films or television shows that asked one to support a war in Korea, the consensus split. Here established leaders could view the war as a victory, But viewers saw the American retreating from the Yalu in ways that could interpreted as a defeat. They also saw characters who were reluctant to leave the

private consumer home for war in Asia. Faced with this conflict, the audiences, like many of the characters on the screen, were ashamed of their thoughts. In other words, as I found in my own article on the Korean War, "Reluctant Crusaders: Korean War Films and the Lost Audience, the mass audiences resisted the "official truth" that Korea was a victory rather than a tragedy. Even the exception proved the rule. For as the audiences did support Samuel Fullers The Steel Helmet, they validated the power of mass art to express dissent and counter narratives to official policies.

All in all, these two papers reveal that officials used established institutions of the state and the mass media to evoke a triumphal cold war ethos But to assume that their doctrines struck deep chords in the populace, is to ignore that the evidence of the Korean War in the popular arts. To be sure, these papers suggest that the Korean War was "forgotten" because, on the one hand, it ran against established leaders call for victory. On the other hand, the public remained silent, but this does not mean they agreed. Yet that amnesia would not do when the Vietnam War renewed the conflict on a new terrain.. But this time the public’s growing unwillingness to die in Asia yielded not private, but public protests that would rock what seemed on the surface to be a monolithic Cold War consensus to its very foundations. Yet a look at the response to the Korean War reveals that the doubts had been laid a decade earlier.

The Harry S. Truman Library and The Eisenhower Library are two of ten Presidential Libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.