Innocent Weapons

The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War

Margaret Peacock

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781469633442
  9781469618579
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469618586
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the 1950s and 1960s, images of children appeared everywhere, from movies to milk cartons, their smiling faces used to sell everything, including war. In this provocative book, Margaret Peacock offers an original account of how Soviet and American leaders used emotionally charged images of children in an attempt to create popular support for their policies at home and abroad.

Groups on either side of the Iron Curtain pushed visions of endangered, abandoned, and segregated children to indict the enemy’s state and its policies. Though the Cold War is often characterized as an ideological divide between the capitalist West and the communist East, Peacock demonstrates a deep symmetry in how Soviet and American propagandists mobilized similar images to similar ends, despite their differences. Based on extensive research spanning fourteen archives and three countries, Peacock tells a new story of the Cold War, seeing the conflict not simply as a divide between East and West, but as a struggle between the producers of culture and their target audiences.

Index

• Abrams, Henry, 168
• Abuladze, Tengiz, 1, 9, 143, 147, 149, 159. See also Someone Else’s Children
• Acheson, Dean, 162
• Acheson-Lilienthal Plan, 162
• Adler v. Board of Education, 74
• African American children, images of, 5, 10, 69, 194; and Boy Scouts, 111–13; education and, 47; girls, 49; in Soviet propaganda, 46–49, 51; threatened by poverty, 112–13; threatened by white America, 49, 111. See also Civil rights movement; “Other” children, images of
• Agitprop, 78
• Aid to Dependent Children of Unemployed Parents Act, 89
• Akhmadulina, Bella, 79
• Akhmatova, Anna, 123
• Alcohol, 56, 83
• Alexandrov, Grigorii, 46
• Alexeiev, Nina I., 53–55, 233 (n. 26)
• All-Russia Physics and Mathematics Olympiad, 66
• American children, images of: as affluent, 19, 27–34; and civil defense, 36–39, 162–63, 172; as contained, 18–19, 33–35, 39–41, 92–97, 106, 149, 190, 218; as creative, 39, 42; as deprived, ideologically empty, imperialist, neglected, racist, selfish, and violent, 9, 42–50; as emissaries and activists for peace, 95, 105–17; as happy, 22; as jealous of Soviet youth, 8, 46, 104; as mobilized, 23
• –as threatened by: atom bomb, 3, 6, 10, 37, 40, 45, 56, 69, 108, 118, 161–79, 189–92; bad education, 62; communism, 36, 40, 51, 55, 72–75, 112, 118; consumerism, 87; delinquency, 84–86; media, 88–89; parents, 85–87; the state, 160–62, 187 See also Boy Scouts of America; Children, images of; Girl Scouts of America; “Other” children, images of
• American Educational Policies Commission, 59
• American Education Defense Act, 59
• American Exhib...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Innocent Weapons
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction
• I: BUILDING AN IMAGE, BUILDING A CONSENSUS
• II: REVISING AN IDEAL
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Series