where the heart is

Christina Klein does an excellent job of finding the sentimental in much of Cold War culture. In her examinations of middle-brow culture, we see sentimentalism in cross-cultural narratives of humanist similarities in a variety of forms and more sparse similarities of experience (e.g. "suffering," as seen in Dooley's writing - 91). While these traditional media were seemingly powerful forces in American life (even affecting public policy, such as The Ugly American’s “inspiring” the Peace Corps - 88), they were not the only ones. BeyondReader's Digest,The Saturday Review, and similar entertainment media, Klein positions us with an understanding of the pervasiveness of sentimental rhetoric during this period in our history.

Klein’s use of sentimentality inscribes a broad methodology that she rightly compiles into a quite effective marketing technique for American politics. Sentimentality here is broadly understood as any tug on the heartstrings of America. Toward this end, Klein demonstrates the use of maps and the image-based interpretations that can be made from something as seemingly objective as a factual diagram of the world. Those who look closely will recognize that every map has a political agenda: country positioning, size of latitude and longitude, even country colors all affect emotive interpretation. The Department of State’s Bulletin on page 45 splices the USSR, more or less centers on the Americas, and uses a frequently-seen Northern-expanded map that forces focus on North America, Europe, and Northern Asia.

More stunning however is Life’s “World Struggle” map reprinted on page 35. This middlebrow informative map has shifted attention to the North Pole. While some are actually more proportional than on “normal” maps, many countries’ sizes are extremely distorted. The shift in perspective is most surprising. On this map it seems almost plausible to see the Soviet Union from one of the United States! It shows the proximity of the enemy and surely surprised the average Life reader by helping them recognize just how little space there is between the Soviet Union and the United States. No longer could they claim that distance helped to isolate them from any real danger. The map is in some regards accurate, although it is an effective piece of misleading propaganda, keeping readers from recognizing that the significantly inhabited portions of the USSR and of the US were not nearly as close as a polar map would suggest.

These are logical images that demand emotional responses, politics branded by sentimentality, as Klein describes. They show the world in a symbolically objective form, a map, but they play on fears and on prejudices. The color key of the “World Struggle” map is effective. The strong contrast between the pristine US and the red-tainted Soviets has more meaning than simply the difference between light and dark. The Soviet Union literally bleeds into other countries it has infected. Arrows indicating influence demonstrate this and strike down on other countries, while the US, which has the benefit of being right-side up (as seen on a “normal” map), exudes a soft, light embracing set of curving arrows. These maps are perfect examples of the sort of sentimental spin that official channels put on the Cold War.

Klein later introduces other policies, programs, and media that all use this same emotion-laden methodology, but the maps are the most convincing to me. Novels are fiction, journal articles alongside literary criticism feels like an opinion piece, and many governmental programs were based on personal experience, not on “facts” per se. Maps are not readily understood to be inflected with meaning. They, like the schools in which they’re often found, are often understood to be neutral terrain in a way that no other institution really claims. This, education, is another theme that Klein excellently pursues, but I’ll leave that for someone else to take on.