PEACE AND POETRY

During the 1950s, Americans who spoke out for peace and nuclear disarmament were often suspected of having Communist ties, and many were persecuted. As a result, caution reigned and the peace movement after World War II faltered badly. Even our poets tended to use "code words" to write about the Bomb during those coldest days of the Cold War.

So say two new books by SIUC faculty that explore the social history and poetry of mid-century America. Robbie Lieberman, professor of history, interviewed and corresponded with dozens of people and visited archives around the country to write The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anticommunism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963 (Syracuse University Press, 2000). And English professor Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 2000) capped 10 years of research.

Communism had its greatest influence in the United States before World War II. Anticommunism hit full stride in the 1940s and 1950s. The interplay between them doomed chances for an effective peace movement in those decades, Lieberman argues.

Many American Communists did grassroots work on behalf of peace. But their slowness to condemn Stalin and their secretiveness about their Communist affiliations made many U.S. peace organizations distrust their motives.

"One of the things I was most interested in was peace organizations that tried to purge themselves of people who might be subversive," says Lieberman. "It split many of these organizations apart."

She sees the 1948 presidential election as a decisive moment for the peace movement. Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace campaigned against Harry Truman on a platform of "peaceful coexistence" with the Soviet Union. "Wallace got creamed for a variety of reasons, but with him went [that] definition of peace," says Lieberman.

As she writes in her book, "The 1948 election not only spelled the end of Communist influence in American politics but also contributed significantly to the splintering of the peace movement."

Anticommunist fervor reached its peak in the early 1950s, with the McCarthy hearings. Lieberman’s book covers other events well known at the time, but not so familiar to us today.

They include the August 1949 rioting at Peekskill, N.Y., where demonstrators tried to derail a concert by Communist sympathizer Paul Robeson and later attacked concert-goers; and the controversy in 1950 over the Stockholm Peace Petition, which demanded the outlawing of atomic weapons. Because the petition was begun by the international Communist movement, it was seen by many as a Soviet ploy—even though millions of people here and abroad agreed with its sentiments and signed it.

"In the years to come, the association of peace with communism made the audience for peace organizations small, defensive, and marginal," Lieberman writes. "The international peace offensive put American organizations in a bind, trying to promote peace without appearing to be ‘Communist dupes.’ Attacks on Communist peace efforts led to attacks on any peace efforts."

By the late 1950s, concern about fallout from H-bomb testing had become so widespread, and the Communist movement so weak, that it became less suspect to demonstrate for peace and disarmament. But the legacy of this conflict has persisted, Lieberman says, so that protesters for peace are still often decried as "commies" or "un-American."

She cites the way protesters against the Vietnam War were branded as subversives in the 1960s. Much more recently, people who opposed the Gulf War sometimes found their patriotism called into question.

The indirect way in which poets spoke of the Bomb in the late 1940s and the 1950s was partly due to this inhospitable political climate, says Edward Brunner. 

"By the early 1950s, poems that were attempting to send a message against the Bomb had to acquire a subtlety new to political writing in America," he writes in Cold War Poetry.

His book thoroughly examines 1950s poetry in the United States, especially women writers who were treated dismissively by male reviewers and whose importance, he says, has never properly been recognized. But about one-fourth of the volume is devoted to poetry and the Bomb.

Many critics have noted a seeming absence of poems about the Bomb, Brunner says. Although he analyzes several poems that deal with this issue directly, he says that poets more often used a kind of "coded" language.

A gentle breeze may, the context suggests, carry deadly fallout. A brilliant star may be a stand-in for the blinding atomic flash. And all manner of metaphors evoking the mushroom cloud appear in works that express uncertainty about the future—as when John Berryman refers in one poem to "an evil sky (where the umbrella bloomed)."

Faced with this specter, poets turned inward. In a section ironically titled "Nuclear Family," Brunner notes that many poets wrote poems expressing their desire, and inability, to shield their children from the atomic age. 

"In none of these poems is the Bomb ever mentioned directly," he writes. Instead, it is an "unstated presence."

This focus on the family, especially in poems that addressed a young child directly, broke from the poetry of the preceding few decades. 

Without the Bomb and the Cold War on our doorstep, this new "domestic" style might have developed anyway. But Brunner doubts that it would have been so notable or so widespread. 
 

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