| In 1950, the term "brainwashing" first entered the American Cold War lexicon and in short order became embedded in the national psyche. Initially defined as a new and sinister form of Communist mind control and popularly associated with the odd, "un-American" behavior of American POW's during the Korean War, over time the concept would evolve and stray from its original cultural domain and became one of the most ubiquitous and malleable concepts of the post-war era. This dissertation re-examines the history of Cold War America through the prism of brainwashing, a little-explored cultural concept that stood at the intersection of American popular thought, gender, politics, and foreign policy formulation during the first post-war decades of tense national anti-communism.;The principal contention of my project is that brainwashing assisted in several crucial transformations in the Cold War of the 1950s. First, it encouraged Americans to conceptualize the Cold War within an increasingly individualistic framework, rather than in broader geo-political terms. Second, it simultaneously sparked a self-critique of the United States during the height of the Cold War that revealed a substantial level of insecurity with the state of American society. And, finally, it forced Americans to reevaluate the nature of personhood and the limits of personal autonomy in the face of large and impersonal forces of modernity and its attended ideologies. All three transformations shaped the cultural terrain on which both communism and capitalism came to be understood in the post-war years. |
