Mapping the Cold War

Cartography and the Framing of America’s International Power

Timothy Barney

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781469618548
• eBook ISBN: 9781469618555
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In this fascinating history of Cold War cartography, Timothy Barney considers maps as central to the articulation of ideological tensions between American national interests and international aspirations. Barney argues that the borders, scales, projections, and other conventions of maps prescribed and constrained the means by which foreign policy elites, popular audiences, and social activists navigated conflicts between North and South, East and West. Maps also influenced how identities were formed in a world both shrunk by advancing technologies and marked by expanding and shifting geopolitical alliances and fissures. Pointing to the necessity of how politics and values were “spatialized” in recent U.S. history, Barney argues that Cold War–era maps themselves had rhetorical lives that began with their conception and production and played out in their circulation within foreign policy circles and popular media. Reflecting on the ramifications of spatial power during the period, Mapping the Cold War ultimately demonstrates that even in the twenty-first century, American visions of the world — and the maps that account for them — are inescapably rooted in the anxieties of that earlier era.

1: Iron Albatross

Air-Age Globalism and the Bird’s-Eye View of American Internationalism

In April 1941, almost eight months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Saint Paul Institute’s Science Museum in Minnesota premiered an exhibition entitled Can America Be Bombed? Using a series of massive spherical maps, the display visually explored the geography of North America and its relation to the Pacific and Europe in terms of bombing ranges and their strategic functions. As Louis H. Powell, the director of the exhibit, later wrote: “In those far-off days of 1940 and 1941 when America was being rudely forced into an awareness of its proximity to Europe and Asia, a new unit for measuring distance on the face of the earth was born—the distance to which a bomber could fly with a paying load of bombs and, with reasonable certainty, return to its base.”¹

Despite the exhibit’s implications for America’s burgeoning international relationships in the new World War context, most striking about the exhibit was the maps’ dramatic form as well as the ways in which they circulated. The show traveled nationwide, to the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh, the New York Museum of Science and Industry, and the art museums of Toledo, Minneapolis, and Albany. Powell was particularly proud that the exhibit “made museum history by surmounting the traditional barriers that separate art and science museums and appearing in leading museums of both kinds.”² Reproductions of several of the units reached the office rotundas of House and Senate buildings in Washington, and some of the cartographic experiments used at the institute produced forty-inch blackboard-surfaced globes for tracing international routes in the navy’s aerial navigator training program.³

Can America Be Bombed? was an example of the wide usage of new mapping forms during the World War II period. The exhibit illustrated the move from a flat-map conception of the world to a more flexible, active engagement with world space emerging at the time. A restlessness of vision marked this period in the 1940s—brought about by the concurrence of expanding world commitments with the military and commercial possibilities of air travel. Indeed, the emphasis on the entire globe as a field of strategy helped form the basis of a spatially conscious popular culture, imaginatively enhanced by the new cartographic technologies of what came to be known as “air-age globalism.”

American isolationism was a dying ideology, but the planes that reached the stagnant ships in Pearl Harbor finally put the nails in its coffin for good, and maps would come to textualize the new global scope for a wide array of audiences.⁴ Moreover, maps were employed as a lens of vision in the highest halls of leadership. In his fireside chat of February 23, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt referenced the momentous political implications of this new perspective in geopolitics: “Those Americans who believed that we could live under the illusion of isolationism wanted the American eagle to imitate the tactics of the ostrich. Now, many of those same people, afraid that we may be sticking our necks out, want our national bird to be turned into a turtle. But we prefer to retain the eagle as it is—flying high and striking hard.”⁵ FDR’s press secretary Stephen T. Early even dispatched statements to national newspapers a week prior to the chat. He requested that Americans bring their maps and globes with them as they sat and listened to the president’s next war update “so that they might clearly and, in that way, much better understand him as he talks with them.”⁶ Appealing directly to armchair cartographers, FDR demanded, “Look at your map. . . . This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons, but also in its geography.”⁷

The new geopolitics dictated that the oceans no longer protected the United States from the world; the new cartographic measurement would become minutes, not miles. As head of the Library of Congress’s Map Division, Walter Ristow, wrote in 1944, “All geography becomes home geography when the most distant point on earth is less than sixty hours from your local airport.”⁸ This discourse of the air was reflected both in the shift toward popular, journalistic cartography during World War II and in the rapid growth of the U.S. government’s already sizable cartographic apparatus. Novel types of maps and globes covered the walls and desks of academics and defense bureaucrats but also found their way into American homes in new and compelling ways. World War II newsreels brought in maps as constant tropes to spatialize both American victories and desperation on the European and Pacific fronts, while commercial supporters of the war effort like Walt Disney saw cartography as a central medium for the new immediacy of America’s expectations as world leader in such a devastatingly massive conflict.⁹

More important, though, for this discussion are the ways in which these new discursive formations, born of World War II strategy and anxieties, began to shape and support a larger liberal, modern internationalism that would come to characterize postwar conceptions of America’s “place” in the global community. Alan Henrikson’s crucial work on maps as “ideas” concludes that “this mental transformation and shrinkage of the earth during World War II was . . . a major cause of the ‘Cold War,’ a factor of no less significance than the well-known military, political, economic, and ideological causes.”¹⁰ While avoiding the causalism that marks Henrikson’s conclusions, I suggest in this chapter how the novel air-age cartographic perspectives of this era helped shape the interpretive ground on which the Cold War could be waged. I argue that air-age mapping mediates a historic shift in American foreign policy and spatial worldview from classic principles of political realism (and its emphasis on geopolitically defined states and concrete balances of power) toward a more fluid, abstract, and image-based internationalism.¹¹ In this sense, the map served as both a mode of artistically envisioning a new internationalism and a powerful instrument of scientific precision in the protection of American interests. As Frank Ninkovich writes, “Interests, formerly ‘hard,’ material, and national, became by this new standard soft, symbolic, and international.”¹² Thus, in Ninkovich’s estimation, “interpretation” became the central focus, with both popular audiences and leaders coming to “ ‘read’ the international environment as if it was a text,” and the global order imagined and argued into being, not simply achieved through a “mastery of objective details.”¹³

The bird’s-eye view from the airplane’s vantage point was replicated in the formal conventions of maps, as cartographers attempted to encompass sweeping movement on the static page.¹⁴ From journalists to academics to government technicians, there was a rising consensus that the hemispheric world of traditional boundaries and power relationships was no longer viable. The sheer amount of competing ways to project this shift, however, shows that there was little agreement about the forms this new internationalism would take. On the one hand, air-age maps are not unique to other maps, in that they present particular spatial problems that can be used to frame solutions—the map itself being used instrumentally for a strategic objective (i.e., “seeing” World War II correctly will help wage successful war), thus needing a sense of transparency and clarity. At the same time, the conventions of the map are now dramatically emphasized, with the novelty of perspective and projection itself a main subject of the map. The map now calls attention to itself in a way that converges artistic vision and scientific innovation. In short, the very rhetoricity of the map steps into the foreground. Every new perceptual angle and strange projection spatially revealed a new strategic relationship, setting a premium on being able to constantly shift one’s visual perception through active adaptation and vigilance.

In the process, a tension emerged between the view of America’s place on the globe as indicative of the promise of an idealistic global community and the frightening prospect of a world that was too close and that needed to be ordered and secured. This tension would encompass a struggle during World War II and into the early Cold War between the opportunity for a new openness on the international stage and a need for rigidity against challengers both militarily and ideologically—a struggle taking place at the highest echelons of American foreign policy. On one hand, practitioners like George Kennan in his original “Long Telegram” would argue for a return to a sober and stoic realist form of geopolitics where nations acted out of clear self-interests in classic balances of power.¹⁵ Containment, of course, was built on this idea of admitting a tragic world where, for Kennan, “elements of weakness and virtue are too thoroughly and confusingly intermingled,” and therefore Americans must accept, but constantly limit, the Soviet threat.¹⁶ Peoples under this threat, wrote Kennan, were “less interested in abstract freedom than in security,” and Soviet leadership acted like any government in that “it can be placed by tactless and threatening gestures in a position where it cannot afford to yield even though this might be dictated by its sense of realism.”¹⁷

At the same time, more than a few of Kennan’s colleagues were seeing a wider, universal trajectory for American power, the kind of moral exceptionalism that would eventually become the more all-encompassing view of the Cold War that emerged from the infamous NSC-68 articulation of national security goals. The NSC-68 committee expressed, for example, by 1950 that the limited realism of containment “tends to inhibit our initiative and deprives us of opportunities for maintaining a moral ascendancy in our struggle with the Soviet system.”¹⁸ In many ways, the very construction of the Cold War was founded on these kinds of tensions between the lonely steadiness of containment and the bold performance of liberation. And American maps were beginning to trace both that fearful sense of containment and the notion of a moral responsibility for the United States to set the tone for the world. Thus, the world was alarmingly smaller, but America’s role was seen as larger and the stakes somehow higher.

While a wide range of cartographic discourses during World War II and the early Cold War evidenced such a struggle, this chapter highlights one compelling case to represent the complex and contested role of new cartographies in the visual displays of America’s rise to internationalism. The popular geographies in newspapers and magazines galvanized air-age rhetoric in particularly profound ways, involving American audiences as consenting participants in global strategy. A close look at the work of Fortune magazine’s longtime artist Richard Edes Harrison, the leading journalistic cartographer (and prolific map critic) during World War II, provides a particularly instructive example of this phenomenon. Harrison was responsible for the employment of provocative new projections that challenged conceptions of East-West and North-South, and he created maps that placed readers in the perspective of a pilot flying over strategic areas of international conflict.¹⁹ His work was collected in best-selling wartime atlases such as Look at the World: The Fortune Atlas for World Strategy, and he wrote extensively in both popular and academic outlets about the need for flexibility in the use of maps.²⁰

In Harrison’s case, I consider his maps with specific attention to the visual and discursive characteristics of his mapping philosophy. At the same time, I also contextualize Harrison’s contributions to air-age culture as part of a larger American development toward internationalism, while accounting for the constraints of the journalistic, popular medium in which he worked. Harrison’s global worldviews implicitly accept cartography as a constructed, contingent, and contestable discourse, able to shape perception rather than simply reflect spatial relationships. At the same time, his cartographic contributions offer particular parameters for the ways in which the postwar landscape would be seen as a field of global strategy. It is in this nexus between the ideological and the strategic that this chapter unfolds. Air-age vision and cartographic perspectives from popular sources like Harrison helped draw the lines on which Cold War space was bounded ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mapping the Cold War
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Rhetorical Lives of Cold War Maps
• 1: Iron Albatross
• 2: One World or Two?
• 3: Images of Commitment and Evidentiary Weapons
• 4: Framing the Third World
• 5: The End of Cartography
• Conclusion: From Globalism to Globalization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index