Making Democracy Safe for the Wworld

Abstract

Recent literature has argued that, beginning in the late 1940s, the increasing ideological competition between the Soviet Union and the United States-or, more broadly, between communism and capitalism-transformed America's record of racial discrimination and violence into an international issue with consequences for U.S. foreign policy. This article challenges that historiography by raising questions about both the timing and the cause of the increasing importance of civil rights to the U.S. foreign policy process. It focuses roughly equally upon the damage that discrimination against Latinos in the Southwest did to the Good Neighbor Policy and the dif�culties of the World War II propaganda organization, the Of�ce of War Information, in portraying America's racial practices to the world. To account for these examples requires us to recognize the World War II years-not the Cold War-as the decisive turning point when the history of domestic race relations could no longer be sanguinely ignored by U.S. policymakers.

Popular media, war propaganda and retroactive continuity: The construction of the enemy in Marvel comics (1942–1981)

“…However, this aim faced what Hart (2004: 78) calls 'the nearly universal perception that the U.S. government endorsed racism' in the WWII context. Just as the OWI attempted to counter the widespread image of the US as a racist country during WWII (Hart, 2004), we may interpret SBA Marvel's comics as another effort to purge racism -and more specifically, anti-Japanese racism -from popular culture, thus resolving the contradiction faced by American propaganda in WWII. Factors related to the ideological evolution of war comics should also be considered: as Scott (2014) indicates, most comics during the Vietnam era were pro-war, or neutral, but there was also a significant number taking an anti-war stance.…”

“…Marvel’s covers fit the idea that superhero comics were an important part of the ‘othering’ strategy regarding the enemy (Murray, 2011). The hard-core racism of anti-Japanese comic-book propaganda somehow reflects the racial discrimination of real-world policies, like wartime internment of Japanese Americans (Hart, 2004). WWII comics were not only harsh in regard to racial stereotyping: for enemy-related themes conveyed by the covers, every single one is more frequently used in wartime – except militarism, which is more relevant in SBA comics than in wartime publications.…”

“…Contextually, the less dehumanizing – and less racist – perspective that Marvel adopted in the SBA can be related to wider political factors. As Hart (2004: 84) notes, ‘the importance of image – especially with respect to race – became clear to policymakers during the course of World War II.’ This shift in perception may be related to the role of the US image in the postcolonial world that emerged after WWII, in which racism might have problematized the postwar imperial design of US dominance and the American century. Although, by WWII, the US still adhered to a semi-isolationist foreign policy, the global war, and later the Cold War, gave focus to America’s involvement in world affairs (Brzezinski, 1973).…”

“…As a result, the Japanese ‘were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle’ (Benedict, 1967: 1). This cultural chasm explains how race pervaded American anti-Japanese propaganda, with the infamous internment of Japanese-Americans in camps coexisting with a campaign inciting racial hatred (Murray, 2011) – indeed, the State Department’s Far Eastern Division produced a memorandum concluding that ‘one of the important aspects of our war with Japan is that it is racial’ (cited in Hart, 2004: 80).…”

Bazar panamericano: Cultura de consumo y participación popular en el poder estadounidense (1939-1942)

“…59 En estas condiciones, voces en Washington comenzaron a adoptar una posición más comprometida, si bien todavía informal y muy limitada. 60 Thomas A. Guglielmo examina con mayor detalle el esfuerzo transnacional realizado por los activistas en favor de los derechos de los ciudadanos de procedencia mexicana por vincularse al discurso de la Política de Buena Vecindad. 61 No obstante, a los propósitos de este artículo, dichos intercambios contribuyen a dilucidar una importante faceta del la cultura del consumo panamericanista estadounidense.…”