I found this website while researching the CIA family jewels release..

[Joanne98]

I can't remember what I googled.. But if you're up all night anyway, you might want to read it. It sheds some light on how the "thinkers" shape our society...http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1702.htm

The Family and Homeland Security:
Lessons from the Cold War Years*

By Allan C. Carlson


* Another version of this essay will appear in The ‘American Way’: Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, forthcoming this year from ISI Books.


The tension between cultural pluralism and national unity became in the mid-20th century an acute problem for the architects of American national security policy.

When relatively isolated from great power politics in the hundred years after 1815, the American republic had little compelling need to press a common identity onto the dozens of immigrant communities scattered throughout the continent. The existence of a free, largely unregulated economy, the decentralized nature of the era’s print media, the cushion of a vast frontier, the overshadowing of national politics by state and local concerns, and the maintenance of but a tiny peacetime army further diminished both the necessity for and the means of achieving national integration. Beneath an Anglo-Saxon veneer, and notwithstanding the “Americanization” efforts of the settlement house and public school movements, the great wave of immigration after 1840 created a multilingual, culturally diverse society. The minimum measure of American unity arose from the primacy of the English language, a common (if not universal) European cultural heritage, and popular reverence for those ideals—freedom, democracy, social equality, respect for law, individual rights, and the self-directed pursuit of happiness and virtue—that animated the nation’s founding documents and were reflected in analyses such as Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

However, America’s entry into The Great War and its postwar flirtation with international responsibility brought new strains on the nation’s domestic arrangements. “European questions” of national identity became critical American questions as well. “It is not how people will live in the future,” German sociologist Max Weber had written in 1895, which stirs us when we think about the conditions lying beyond our own graves, but rather who they shall be. Neither peace nor the pursuit of happiness but the eternal struggles for the preservation and development of our national identity are the goals we have to bestow to our children.1

Wilsonian internationalism emerged briefly to answer this challenge as a fresh extension of the American adventure, but it quickly faded as a motivating creed. Instead, the American nation began to grope for an identity that went beyond ideal constructs, one involving a common conception of “the good life” and giving shape to the norms of individual behavior in the family, marketplace, and places of worship. Enormous cultural, political and legal pressures were directed towards the “Americanization” of existing immigrant communities. The campaign to throttle “hyphenated” America, the “Red Scare” of 1920, and the 1924 restrictions on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe all reflected a national search, however crude, for a common identity.

In the 1940s, the United States’ full assumption of great power status and global responsibility raised again questions about the nation’s identity, values, and purposes, and about the meaning of the phrase “the American way of life.” In contrast to the 1920s, though, American scholars and intellectuals took the lead in confronting these problems. Significantly, the three persons giving intellectual shape to postwar U.S. national security policy—George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, and Walt Rostow—were each drawn into the new debate on national character. The “challenge of Communism” emerged as the common foil for their efforts to identify and analyze the American identity.

Remarkably, U.S. society appeared to generate in these years a clear value consensus, one resting primarily on a strengthened model of the American family. Pessimism among scholars over the shape and direction of the American character gave way by the late 1950s to optimism. This image of a solidifying, uniform social identity influenced in critical ways the national security decisions made during the Kennedy and early Johnson administrations.

Yet the newly achieved identity consensus celebrated by most American intellectuals proved to be more fragile than they had anticipated. It began crumbling in the middle 1960s and collapsed altogether during the early 1970s, the victim of ideological challenge and an unprecedented normative revolution. Its loss left a vacuum at the core of American national security policy, one contributing markedly to its disarray.

Global Responsibility and the National Character

The late 1940s and 1950s, according to one commentator, was a time of “national self-analysis” when scholars and amateurs alike dissected Americans “as though we were a newly discovered tribe of aborigines.”2 Noted anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn expressed common uncertainties in a widely published 1950 essay, declaring that “the United States needs a good five cent ideology far more than it needs a good five-cent cigar.” The overwhelming majority of Americans, he believed, rejected Communism. “But they long for a creed less partisan, less vague, and less anachronistic than that of most of their political oratory.” Even those Americans who had never entered a church, Kluckhohn maintained, agreed “that common values are urgently necessary to a healthy society.” The search for such a “pan-human value code,” he insisted, was the great task before the social sciences.3

Yet the first major study of postwar American identity turned national self-analysis in a negative direction. In his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman (with the assistance of Nathan Glazer) presented a deceptively simple thesis. He argued that the “inner directed” individual, who linked a Greek-style rationality to a Judeo-Christian vision of morality, was passing away as the ideal American type. Increasingly dominant in postindustrial America, Riesman argued, was the “other directed” man. Where “inner directed” individuals responded to a fixed, internalized moral code set by the extended family, “other directed” men looked to peer groups and shifts in fashion for guidance in ordering their lives. “Other directed” families, Riesman added, no longer formed a closely knit unit exhibiting a hierarchy of values to be passed on to their children. Instead, parents were now virtually helpless before the school and “the real or imaginary approving group” which shaped their offsprings’ attitudes. The decline in America’s birthrate during the interwar period and a resulting “gerontocracy” blocking upward social mobility symbolized “a profound change in values—a change so deep that, in all probability, it has to be rooted in character structure.” Family ineffectiveness, demographic decline, and moral faddishness were, according to Riesman, the hallmarks of the American way in the postwar era.4

The Lonely Crowd proved to be a national sensation. Widely quoted and urged on the uninitiated, sales surged beyond the half-million mark after release of a paperback edition in 1954. A flood of books and articles on the American character followed, many echoing the same sense of relative stagnation. Representative was William Whyte’s The Organization Man, which emphasized the decline of “the Protestant Ethic” as an internalized social control and its replacement by tools of conformity within the corporate organizational structure.5

This absorption with American character and identity became intertwined with the debate over national security policy. Writing in 1949 for Foreign Affairs, Geroid T. Robinson noted that, in the face of “a simultaneous domestic and foreign crisis” brought on by world Communism, America’s “principle weakness” was not economic or military, “but ideological.” The U.S. faced the crisis of 1949 with “the ideological equipment of 1775.”

Piecemeal answers, Robinson argued, would not inspire men and women to sacrifice on behalf of their nation. Only “a total conception of the good life,” one with “some valid connection with their experience and some valid promise of a realization in the future,” could mobilize Americans to meet the Communist challenge. There was an “urgent need,” he insisted, for philosophic reconstruction both “to say what America now is” and “to suggest what America might become.” Significantly, Robinson rested his hopes for such a universalized vision of “Americans” on the “family farm” and “the individual household”—the sole surviving centers of the “independent and self-directing individual.”6

In a lecture given the same year, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr stated that Americans stood “before the enemy in the first line of battle” with ideological weapons “frequently as irrelevant as were the spears of the knights, when gunpowder challenged their reign.” Notably, in working out his response to this American predicament, Niebuhr came to emphasize the critical importance of the communities of family and of faith in broadening and enriching the idealized American identity. The “most genuine community,” he stressed in a 1951 lecture, was established below and above the level of conscious moral idealism. Below that level we find the strong forces of...sex and kinship, common language and geographically determined togetherness, operative. Above that level of idealism, the most effective force of community is religious humility.

Such resources were “of greater importance in our nation today than abstract constitutional schemes,” Niebuhr explained, because they appealed more directly to “the urgencies and anxieties which nations, less favored than we, experience.”7

Somewhat later, J. Robert Oppenheimer acknowledged the same problem, but offered a very different response. “y matching ourselves against a remote and unloved antagonist,” he wrote, “we have come upon a problem of the greatest gravity for the life of our people.” The Communist challenge had raised basic questions about the contemporary American character and had given rise to “a rather deep, refractory, and quite unprecedented cultural crisis.” As the quintessential liberal, though, Oppenheimer believed that this land of “diversity” and “true pluralism” could never hold any unifying theory of what human life was about. “There is no consensus as to the nature of reality or the part we are to play in it,” Oppenheimer concluded, “no theory of the good life, and not much theory of the role of government in promoting it.” Compared to the European peoples, Americans were “nomads.” Oppenheimer believed that only pragmatic science, “the community of the concrete undertaking,” could provide the opportunity for a sense of common American purpose.8

Writing for Partisan Review, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reached essentially the same conclusion. “The only answer to mass culture,” he noted, in words echoing Horace Kallen, “...lies in the affirmation of America, not as a uniform society, but as a various and pluralistic society made up of many groups with diverse interests.”9

However, the principal theoretician within the State Department during the late 1940s, George F. Kennan, was at first more sanguine about America’s ability to achieve unity. In fact, he openly welcomed the Communist threat as a stimulant to a firmer definition of the American character. “The issue of Soviet-American relations,” he concluded in his famous 1947 “X” article for Foreign Affairs, “is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations.” The “thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations,” he added, would indeed “experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.”10

Dulles, the Moral Law, and the Challenge of Communism

Wall Street lawyer John Foster Dulles developed during the 1940s a similar sense of the need for a reinvigorated American character and sense of purpose. Echoing Niebuhr, though, Dulles came to insist that such identity have a moral and religious foundation. The intellectual path which he followed to this conclusion is instructive.

Dulles’ service on the U.S. delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 had stirred in him a strong sense of Wilsonian idealism. “n Woodrow Wilson,” Dulles stated in 1941, “we had leadership which was calm, wise and powerful and which would utilize victory to make transition to a better world order.” Making an equally strong impression on Dulles was his attendance at the 1937 Oxford Conference on Church and State. “Up to that time I confess I had kept such Christianity as I had in a separate compartment from the activities of international affairs in which I was engaged,” he later wrote. “At the Oxford Conference...I began to see that the problems separating the human race into hostile warring factions could only be solved in the atmosphere of something broader than nationalism and narrow patriotism.” In consequence, Dulles pledged his remaining years to “more effectively serve the cause of international peace” and to seek out “the fellowship of Christians,” believing as he did that results could best be achieved “by the cooperative action of those who possess the spiritual qualities Christ taught.”11

In early 1941, Dulles was named chairman of the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, a project of the Federal Council of Churches. In his early remarks, Dulles stressed the need for a rallying public purpose, one transcending parochial American interests. “Our great national weakness today is not physical, but spiritual,” he declared in May. “We lack a constructive purpose which is inspiring and contagious. We appear to be purely on the defensive and to be supporting the status quo of a national sovereignty system which has become vitally defective.” In his September 1941 response to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and Winston Churchill’s Atlantic Declaration, Dulles criticized the document for falling “short of the conceptions of President Wilson” and “short of the conceptions expressed by the great ecumenical conferences of recent years.” The true imperative, Dulles charged, was to plan “fearlessly” for “a new world order.” He called for eradication from the American system of “that immoral principle of national irresponsibility which the sovereignty system now sanctifies” and, “s a beginning of world government,” the organization of “an international federation for peace.”12

This is a Dulles that few would recognize by the late 1950s. Significantly, consideration of the postwar role of the Soviet Union drew no attention from him or the Commission until 1946. It was only in May of that year that Dulles admitted “that our Commission has been derelict in not facing up to the Russian problem.” He blamed himself for this, but pledged to do better, claiming that “I have a clear understanding of the fundamentals, at least, of Soviet foreign policy.”13 His emerging new vision combined recognition of the unprecedented dangers of Communism with an unsettling awareness of America’s moral and social weakness. The net result, though, was his heightened sense of American identity and ideological purpose.

In a May 1946 address to the Presbyterian General Assembly, Dulles placed emphasis on America’s uniqueness and fragility. The proponents of human freedom, he stated, had never been more than a tiny minority. Today, the prestige of freedom was tarnished and the confidence of its proponents waning. Twenty-five years of war and depression had revealed serious infirmities in Western society. World leadership seemed to be passing to the Soviets.14

In the face of these negative developments, Dulles urged reconstituting the “great American experiment” in liberty. It was a task, he added, that placed primary responsibility on the churches. “For the truth is that a society of freedom cannot persist, and probably ought not to persist, except as a religious society.” Individual liberty, he insisted, must be tempered by self-control. Indeed, it was “dangerous to give freedom to people who do not feel under a moral compulsion to exercise self-restraint and self-sacrifice.... An atheistic society is inherently a dictatorial society.” While noting that Americans daily witnessed against their professed faith, Dulles believed that “the moral law”—usually defined by him as the Ten Commandments supplemented by Christ’s Great Commandment—still operated in the United States. He concluded that “he future of the world depends, above all, on whether we Americans demonstrate that a people who, by the grace of God are free, are also a people who, through acceptance of divine commandment, are people of self-restraint, self-discipline and self-sacrifice.”

Elsewhere, Dulles stressed historian Arnold Toynbee’s argument that change is inexorable and that societies demand challenges in order to remain vigorous and creative. “A sense of mission is...needed if a society is to become and remain free,” Dulles stated. “A people without a dynamic faith are constantly on the defensive and that is a losing posture.” Communism, he hinted repeatedly, provided the Christian West with just such a challenge.15

Yet Dulles’ vision of a global American mission, demanded by and responding to the Communist challenge and animated by Christian principles, ran into logical and practical difficulties when faced with the pluralism of American society. In a 1950 address to a Jewish group in Cleveland, for example, Dulles found himself stressing “the strength of diversity” and “the right to be different and independent.” While still calling for “a free people of dynamic faith,” he termed it “dangerous business to mix politics and religion” and cited “the unwisdom of invoking religion as a means of advancing political ends.”16

Dulles was less than happy with this formulation, though. Less than two years later, he declared that “diversity alone is not enough. It must be contained within a framework of unity.” Interestingly, the Communist challenge again provided an out. “In time of external peril,” he declared, “it is necessary for a nation to maximize what unifies, so that differences become minimized. That is why our nation today stands in need of unifying forces, for never before has our peril been so great.” The proper way to achieve unity, he believed, was to “emphasize values that we hold in common.” The irreducible minimum, Dulles stated, was “love of God and love of country.” They must be the nation’s “great dependence,” keeping “differences within tolerable bounds.”17

Dwight Eisenhower shared his Secretary of State’s basic perceptions of the Communist danger and the demands that it placed on America. “Russia is definitely out to communize the world,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary in 1947. Six years later, he affirmed that “the great struggle of our time is an ideological one.” Eisenhower’s 1957 Presidential inaugural address, to choose a prominent later example, focused primarily on the sinister “designs” and “dark... purpose” of international Communism, seeking as it did “to seal forever the fate of those it has enslaved.” In a 1958 speech at the Naval Academy, Eisenhower stressed that “the threat imposed by militant and aggressive atheism” demanded “the strengthening of all phases of our moral and spiritual foundations” in order to enhance “the national security of our nation. He added: “The stronger we become spiritually, the safer our civilization.”18

Indeed, the 1950s found Americans again groping semi-consciously
http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia_1702.htm