The uses and abuses of anti-communism by southern segregationists as a weapon of massive resistance, 1948-1965

PhD ThesisWithin the United States, the southern strategy of Massive Resistance to federally mandatedr acial desegregationh ad its origins in 1948, a year which saw the confirmation of Cold War hostilities in Europe. As a result, the dialogue surrounding matters of race was infused with Cold War rhetoric. Between 1950 and 1954, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy added to this milieu, reinvigorating anticommunism and red-baiting as political weapons. Allied to the traditional southern fear of "outsiders," many southerns egregationists seized upon anti-communism as a weapon to undermine opponents promoting change to the region's racial status quo. This thesis, however, challenges the notion that all segregationists used anticommunism against all integrationists at all times. Rather, anti-communism could be a subtle, flexible political tool which individuals and groups tailored to suit their own needs. At times, it was used to rebuff specific civil rights campaigns, activists and organisations. At others, it was used sparingly. One of the main tenets of this thesis is that, hitherto, segregationists have commonly been treated in rather one-dimensional terms by historians of the civil rights movement. By examining their diverse responses to anti-communism and wider Cold War anxieties, it is argued that they were not the homogeneous political group that many have suggested, but in many ways were as resourceful and pragmatic as those they opposed in the civil rights movement. This thesis also examines some apparent anomalies in the uses of anticommunism and Cold War rhetoric. Opponents of segregation berated segregationists for undermining America's attempts to court newly independent, post-colonial states in the Caribbean, Asia and Africa. No predominately non-white country, they argued, would align with the US-dominated West rather than the Soviet East with such blatant racism endemic in the American South. Segregationists were accused of being more totalitarian than their Soviet counterparts, and of bringing Soviet-style one party rule to the region. Finally, by looking in depth at two southern states, North Carolina and Virginia, this thesis will do more justice to the nuances and complexities of anticommunism than would be possible in a broader, regional study. Both states were at the legislative forefront of Massive Resistance, and both propounded a more sophisticated -- though no less determined -- brand of racism than most of their counterpartsi n the Deep South, largely as a consequence of their reliance on external investment.Runciman Studentship, Newcastle University: Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro American and African Studies,UVa, Charlottesville: Roosevelt Study Center, Middelberg, Netherlands

Blood sports: violence and the performance of masculinity in early modern drama

This dissertation explores the construction of masculine identity at the intersection between early modern English drama and competitively violent entertainment. It argues that early modern Englishmen navigated a complex system of dangers and rewards associated with violent self-assertion, and that the playhouse represented a space uniquely suited to the embodying and interrogating of that system. Spaces used for performing plays frequently doubled as venues for cockfights, animal baitings, and fencing exhibitions, and the violence of such entertainments often appeared, either physically or rhetorically, in the period's drama. The project of the dissertation will be to provide a historicizing lens through which to view this violence "in play" in order to understand how early modern English drama refracted and participated in shaping the period's highly contested norms of violent self-assertion in the performance of male identity. Chapter One maps the cultural disruptions precipitated by the importation of the Italian rapier into late-sixteenth century England. It argues that the secretive exclusivity of rapier culture rendered its novel form of violent masculinity fundamentally "untheatrical" in comparison to more traditional male identities, leading playwrights to caricature the duelist as either a cowardly braggart or a treacherous assassin. Chapter Two examines Shakespeare's plays in light of the discourses described in Chapter One. Shakespeare's work consistently associates traditional weaponry with a threatened male honor culture while associating rapiers with the undermining of male identity through cowardice or treachery. Chapter Three considers the English hunt as a means of asserting a capacity for violence, focusing on attempts to use the wild boar as a means of restoring the hunt's fading masculine associations. The chapter ends with an extended reading of Thomas Heywood's Age plays, the English Renaissance theater's richest staging of hunting culture. Chapter Four offers an historically informed understanding of the interconnections between bearbaiting and theater by addressing the early modern image of the bear as both a terrifying representative of a threatening natural world and a figure of courageous self-defense in the face of overwhelming odds.2016-11-18T00:00:00

Shakespeare and the language of violence.

Focusing on a selection o f Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poems, I examine the way in which violence is articulated in language and argue that language not only figures acts o f violence but is also violent in itself. I begin by situating my argument historically, exploring perceptions o f language and its effects in Renaissance England, and demonstrate that there was a keen sense of the materiality of language. Following on from this, I outline the theoretical insights that inform my argument, highlighting the way in which Marx’s assertion that the subject is socially constructed can be usefully considered in conjunction with Lacan’s conception of the role of language in the development o f the subject. I argue that because language precedes our entry into it, it effects a violent circumscription o f the limits of the subject. I examine the representations o f sexual violence in Titus Andronicus and The Tape of Hucrece and identify the ways in which assumptions about gender difference are encoded within language, producing a female subject position largely shaped by patriarchal imperatives. In Chapter Four, I discuss executions as a highly visible form of state violence during the period and suggest that as a recurring spectacle, they contributed to the changing attitudes towards death. Paying particular attention to the representations of death in / Henry IH, I consider the way in which the production of history occurs at the level of language and emerges out of violent contestation. The violence o f the bear-pit provides the focus for Chapter Five, and I offer a reading of Coriolanus which interrogates the significance of the metaphors o f bearbaiting found throughout the play. I argue that the paradigm o f unremitting violence offered by the sport addresses aspects o f an anxious subjectivity neglected by the teleological form o f tragedy. Finally, I discuss domestic violence in relation to A Yorkshire Tragedy, emphasising that the violent potentiality embodied within linguistic structures is often the agent o f violence inflicted within the domestic sphere

Crisis Bureaucracy: Homeland Security and the Political Design of Legal Mandates

Policymakers fight over bureaucratic structure because it helps shape the legal interpretations and regulatory decisions of agencies through which modern governments operate. In this article, we update positive political theories of bureaucratic structure to encompass two new issues with important implications for lawyers and political scientists: the significance of legislative responses to a crisis, and the uncertainty surrounding major bureaucratic reorganizations. The resulting perspective affords a better understanding of how agencies interpret their legal mandates and deploy their administrative discretion. We apply the theory to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two principal questions surrounding this creation are: (1) why the President changed from opposing the creation of a new department to supporting it and (2) why his plan for such a department was far beyond the scope of any other existing proposal. We argue that the President changed his mind in part because he did not want to be on the losing side of a major legislative battle. But more significantly, the President supported the massive new department in part to further domestic policy priorities unrelated to homeland security. By moving a large set of agencies within the department and instilling them with new homeland security responsibilities without additional budgets, the president forced these agencies to move resources out of their legacy mandates. Perversely, these goals appear to have been accomplished at the expense of homeland security. Finally, we briefly discuss more general implications of our perspective: first, previous reorganizations (such as FDR's creation of a Federal Security Agency and Carter's creation of an Energy Department) also seem to reflect presidential efforts to enhance their control of administrative functions, including some not directly related to the stated purpose of the reorganization; and, second, our analysis raises questions about some of the most often-asserted justifications for judicial deference to agency legal interpretations.

Race, Mines and Picket Lines: The 1925-1928 Western Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal Strike

This Honors Thesis in History explores U.S. race relations and racial politics through the lens of a coal mining strike that took place during the late 1920s, in the Pittsburgh area

The Boxing Discourse in Late Georgian England, 1780-1820 : A Study in Civic Humanism, Gender, Class and Race

Die Arbeit untersucht den Diskurs um das Boxen in der englischen Gesellschaft zwischen circa 1780 und 1820. Sie zeigt, dass er ein wichtiger Schauplatz für die Austragung sozialer, politischer und kultureller Konflikte war. Im Diskurs um das Boxen spiegeln sich in besonderem Maße die Konflikte zwischen civic humanism und politeness wieder, des Konfliktes zwischen zwei einander entgegengesetzten Männlichkeitsidealen: das Ideal vom starken Mann, das von den Boxern verkörpert wird und dem gegenüber das Ideal des verweichlichten und einfühlsamen ‚polite man‘. Boxen nimmt auch eine zentrale Funktion in den Debatten über die Rolle der Arbeiterklasse im ‚body politic‘ ein: von Konservativen wurde es eingesetzt als gegenrevolutionäre Maßnahme, um die Masse zu mobilisieren ohne Ihnen eine politische Teilhabe zu geben. Radikale sahen es als ein Instrument, um die Arbeiter zu ermächtigen, sie über Ihre Rechte zu informieren und deren Ansprüche auf Emanzipation zu legitimieren. Boxen war zudem ein Schlachtfeld, um verschiedene Verständnisse von Rasse und nationaler Identität auszutragen: einem Verständnis, dass das nationale Ganze als ethnisch homogen konstruierte und einem inklusiveren Verständnis der englischen Nation, das Minoritäten nicht ausschließen musste.The study examines the discourse on boxing in English society circa 1780 to 1820. It shows that it was a site of struggle between diverse notions of gender, class, race, and nation. Boxing was a central arena for the opposition between civic humanism and politeness. It was an arena for the struggle between two diametrically opposed manly ideals, the strong and corporeal ideal epitomized by the boxers versus the feminine and sensitive polite ideal. Boxing took on an important role in the debates on the place of the working class in the body politic; conservatives perceived boxing as a counter-revolutionary measure and way to mobilise the masses in defence of their country without granting them political rights. Radicals viewed it as a tool to empowering the workers, educating them on their rights and legitimizing their claims for emancipation. Boxing was also a site of struggle between conflicting notions of race and differing ideas of national identity, specifically between one which saw the nation as ethnically homogenous and another, more cultural understanding of national identity, which was more inclusive to minorities

Fake news diffusion on digital channels: An analysis of attack strategies, responsibilities, and corporate responses

In recent years, the phenomenon of fake news has aroused a growing interest in the academic debate because of its capability to easily spread among digital channels, such as social media platforms, and reach and deceive an increasingly large target of digital users. In this scenario, fake news threatens the credibility of organizations, their products and services, the trust relationship between organizations and consumers, as well as the organizations internal community. Nowadays, organizations are subject to the risk of losing the control of their corporate communication strategies due to phenomena such as the spread of fake news. Hence, although in academic literature there is a growing interest about the impact of fake news, scholars agree that more research is needed to provide a better understanding of the fake news phenomenon. Indeed, hereto no study has focused on how fake news attacks the corporate reputation with reference to the different phases of the fake news life cycle. The aim of this PhD thesis is threefold: (1) to investigate how fake news, during its life cycle, attacks corporate reputation; (2) to identify the key actors involved in the stemming process of fake news and their role; (3) to identify the more effective response strategies of organizations threatened by fake news. To achieve the aim of this exploratory research, a mixed-method approach was adopted. In particular, a qualitative content analysis was conducted on a database of 454 fake news headlines; four longitudinal case studies were analyzed; a survey on a sample of Italian citizens was conducted to investigate their perception and the more effective response strategies of the organizations attacked by fake news. Findings of this research identify two types of borrowed credibility on which fake news leverages and two thematic clusters that characterize them. By crossing these dimensions, four different ideal types of fake news attack strategies emerged. Moreover, the results of this research highlight the weakness of the role of fact checkers, which are unable to access the filter bubbles in which fake news rapidly spreads – fact checkers and fake news branch out on two parallel channels, without crossing each other, and reaching different targets, by representing an ethical challenge for digital platforms such as social media. Finally, the findings of the survey show that it is a widespread and prevailing opinion between Italians that openness and transparency should be the key values of the response strategies. As a matter of fact, the clear answer from the survey respondents is that the best response strategy for the organization attacked by fake news is to be available in providing timely information

How to be an American: community anticommunism and the grassroots right, 1948-1956

This thesis explores the political and cultural impact of community-level conservative activists during the early Cold War red scare in America. It provides a comprehensive overview of the hitherto overlooked aspect of the so-called McCarthy-era - amateur counter-subversives who contributed to the national mood of anticommunism in obscure but meaningful ways. It also establishes significant philosophical and practical connections between disparate groups - some nakedly right-wing, others more vaguely 'patriotic' - that demonstrate the existence of a loose but genuine grassroots anticommunist network. In the broader historical sense, by contextualising the achievements of the embryonic conservative movement, this thesis builds upon the challenges the body of literature that posits the 1960s as the essential decade in the emergence of the modern, socially conservative Republican right. In the last years of the 1940s, factions within the political and legal establishment used red scare rhetoric and new loyalty regulations to visit brief but potent misery upon their liberal and leftist enemies. At the same time, less well-connected Americans signed up for the ideological struggle. Some were members of influential civic organizations - such as the American Legion - whose long-held enmity towards left-wing politics found fresh urgency in the Cold War age; Others joined newly formed pressure groups with the expressed aim of defending their towns and suburbs from Soviet-inspired subversion. Veterans groups, school board campaigns, religious bodies, and women's patriotic societies: all provided forums for local-level attacks on perceived un-Americanism. This thesis utilizes the literature, letters and ephemera of such organizations, as well as local newspaper reports, legal and political investigations, and the personal recollections of activists, to document and analyze the most significant actions carried out in the name of community anticommunism. It examines how grassroots campaigners worked to reshape what it meant to be American, and finds ways in which their efforts - scorned as absurdly reactionary by contemporary observers - pointed towards a shifting American political landscape

A Tale of Two Paradigms: How Genealogical and Comparative Historical analysis can help reset the intractable debate over the causation of ideological violence

This study responds to the endemic lack of clarity and consensus afflicting academic and policy discussions on the causes of ideological violence and, by extension, the appropriate means for preventing/containing it. I trace, conceptualise, and problematise the long-standing debate between two deeply entrenched oppositional camps or ‘paradigms’ – heuristically dubbed the ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ paradigms of ideological violence, respectively – that propose competing explanations for the causation of ideological violence; the former considering it a product of irrational individual dysfunction, the latter viewing it as a rational (if often misguided) response to societal dysfunction. Further, I show that extant attempts at reconciling/synthesising these paradigms have, to date, proven problematic. I explore how and why these opposing paradigms emerged and why debate between them persists. I argue that they are shaped, perpetuated and marred by multiple extra-academic dynamics and naturalised assumptions and conclude that clarity and consensus is unlikely unless we can ‘reset’ the debate, making a conscious decision to ‘step back’ from our extant paradigms/assumptions and approach the phenomenon with fresh eyes. I propose and demonstrate two methodological approaches that – used in conjunction – can contribute towards this end. Firstly, I propose that – and demonstrate how - Genealogical Analysis can aid in this ‘stepping back’ by denaturalising our entrenched assumptions on the causes of ideological violence (i.e., our extant paradigms) by uncovering how and why those assumptions came to be held and reified. Secondly, I propose and demonstrate Comparative Historical Analysis’ utility as a tool that can aid in re-approaching the phenomena with fresh eyes by helping - gradually and collaboratively - to construct a new set of more methodologically-rigorous assumptions (i.e., a new paradigm) upon which extant research built upon either extant paradigm can be resituated, reinterpreted, de-limited, and synthesised, and further research can be premised

Performing Lena: Race, Representation, and the Postwar Autobiographical Performances of Lena Horne

As a hypervisible black woman, whose overdetermined image was evoked by blacks and whites to represent racialized political interests on both sides of the color line throughout the long civil rights era, singer–actress Lena Horne was burdened with the requirement to perform blackness. In this dissertation, I explore Horne’s attempts to negotiate these performance expectations during the postwar, McCarthy, and civil rights eras. I contend that Horne self–fashioned a series of politicized black female personas that negotiated, challenged, and appropriated, with varied and often conflicting results, her Hollywood–manufactured glamour girl image in an effort to talk back to the dominant society and talk to her black audiences. Moreover, I argue that Horne’s autobiographical performances of politicized blackness reflect and shape the changing, always contested, definitions of black “authenticity” and radical protest politics between 1945 and 1965