Creating a Cold War at Home: Electoral Reform, Anti-Communism, and the Struggle to Define Democracy in New York City, 1935--1947
- ISBN-10
- 0542877945
- ISBN-13
- 9780542877940
- Pages
- 291
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2006
- Author
- Daniel O. Prosterman
Description
In this dissertation, I argue that local activists manipulated perceptions of foreign threats to domestic security to sway voters in city elections during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War. Participants in the PR discourse implicated international affairs in metropolitan politics and thereby shaped the local impact of global conflict. New York City residents experienced the oncoming Cold War from within a local context that rarely enters political history. Rather than supporting a claim for New York's uniqueness in this regard, this dissertation provides a case study of how Cold War political culture became intertwined with city politics years before the national anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy period, and even before the end of World War II. This perspective shifts the history of the Cold War earlier in time and more locally in space. At the same time, it compels a corresponding adjustment in the conceptualization of urban political history with an eye toward global interactions.
