The cold war world according to 'My Weekly Reader.' - current events newspaper for public schools

Ron Kovic never doubted the cold war truths that he absorbed during his childhood in Levittown, New York during the 1950s and early 1960s. Ron Kovic learned to hate the communists back then, convinced as he was that they were plotting to subvert his government, even "trying to take over our [school] classes and control our minds." Steeling his thoughts against unpatriotic communist propaganda, ideologically recruited for a sustained cold war effort fought on many fronts, he identified with his country's fortunes, cheering its triumphs, weeping over its defeats. He had joined the Cub Scouts and marched proudly in memorial day parades. He and his friends built fallout shelters out of milk cartons and swore to one another that they would march down to the Levittown shopping center together to enlist in the United States Marines when they came of age.

Meanwhile, Ron Kovik read about the wonders of rocketry and built space ships out of any scrap material available. Some American, hopefully Ron, himself, would be the first rocketeer to travel beyond the earth. Then, "the whole block watched a thing called the space race begin."

On a cold October evening in 1957, the eleven-year-old boy and his father huddled transfixed and speechless as they watched the Soviet Sputnik satellite orbiting across the sky above his house. "We were losing," Ron and most of a stunned America believed, "and America wasn't first anymore." Finally, his entire junior high school celebrated America's belated success as they collectively prayed for an ascending rocket on the television screen. As if this historical event compared to the ninth inning of a baseball game, Ron Kovic remembered later that "a guy was screaming like Mel Allen that the rocket was lifting off ... then the whole room broke into cheers. America had done it. We had put our first satellite into space. 'We did it. We did it!' the guy was screaming at the top of his lungs."

The current events newspaper for public schools, My Weekly Reader, helped shape the political world view of Ron Kovik and thirteen million other American public school children every year during the cold war. But its editors candidly confessed in a 1980s official organizational history that, "Sometimes, looking back today, My Weekly Reader does not seem to have adhered to its platform of fair and unbiased reporting" during the first two decades of that war. They rationalized this transgression by insisting that the publication had merely reflected the "prevailing bias of the age."

To be sure, a ubiquitous mood of anticommunism dominated the political discourse of the entire nation and distorted cold war coverage in virtually all major news magazines. My Weekly Reader's retrospective defense, however, fails to account for the actual reason that earlier editors chose to abandon an ideal of journalistic ethics. Wars do not tolerate intellectual ambiguity or criticism. In this respect, the cold war was no different. More than just merely mirroring the Zeitgeist, My Weekly Reader and other youth newspapers - whether consciously or not - dutifully fulfilled their obligation to mobilize children to defend their country from communism and to support their nation's war against this ideological villain.

Charles Palmer Davis published the first issue of Current Events on May 20, 1902. For twenty-six years, Current Events remained American Education Publications' (AEP) only public school newspaper. AEP geared Current Events to older children of junior high and high school age. AEP's 1928 introduction of My Weekly Reader, the first newspaper specifically targeted toward pupils in elementary grades, represented a new effort to immerse even the youngest of children in contemporary domestic and foreign affairs. AEP, the parent company of Current Events and the many grade-specific elementary editions of My Weekly Reader, grew to be the largest publisher of newspapers for children in the world. Only its chief competitor, Scholastic magazine, rivaled AEP's influence in constructing the political consciousness of America's school children.

A career journalist, Charles Palmer Davis insisted that his newspaper for children would strive toward a standard of" completely fair and unbiased" news. My Weekly Reader followed Davis' guiding principle when it adopted the motto, "To present the news of interest to children, colorfully written, but uncolored."

But the cold war derailed any attempt to paint a picture of a complex world in more subtle colors. In the midst of what constituted a perceived total war, which included an organized and pervasive spirit of anticommunism, it is not surprising that the publication changed course and capitulated to the era's required conformity.

In the world according to My Weekly Reader, for example, the most important social movement of the era did not happen. In none of its thousands of articles from 1947 to 1963 did My Weekly Reader or Current Events ever allude to the Civil Rights Movement that grabbed the attention of the rest of America. Black people did not inhabit Current Event's or My Weekly Reader's world. Written exclusively with a white children's audience in mind, the newspapers simply ignored racial conflict and struck it from the historical record.

According to Terry Borden, a recent editor-and-chief of My Weekly Reader, the newspaper decided that the debate over civil rights, considering the cold war context, was too divisive and "dealt with the issue by avoiding it." This unwillingness on the part of My Weekly Reader to address controversial issues extended to its reporting of domestic anticommunism. Not once did My Weekly Reader or Current Events ever refer to Joseph McCarthy or the anticommunist purges of the 1950s. In My Weekly Reader's world the wartime infringement of civil liberties did not exist. Instead, it handled Joseph McCarthy's accusations of a widespread communist conspiracy and unsubstantiated character assassinations much like President Eisenhower did - by ignoring them.

Through its omissions, My Weekly Reader played a crucial role in offering a limited and distorted view of the cold war to American youth. More often, My Weekly Reader played an active role. In fact, My Weekly Reader turned into a cold war primer for children. Week after week, the newspaper willingly complied with and actively promoted a wartime anticommunist consensus, so pervasive and so powerful that alternative analyses and perspectives became unimaginable. Hundreds of examples could illustrate the degree to which My Weekly Reader oversimplified the complexities of the cold war and tried to mobilize children for the indefinite period of time that the United States would have to struggle against communism.

None, however, captured the imagination of youth more than the "Space Race." My Weekly Reader celebrated America's first successful launch of a satellite as enthusiastically as did Ron Kovic. "We Hang Our First Moon in the Sky," the headline blared. But the Space Race did not begin with Sputnik and the United States' Alpha 1958 Explorer satellite launch later that winter. My Weekly Reader and Current Events had already devoted over a decade of coverage to the space and missile races. One 1949 article intended to capture the imagination of children flashed the news that "the U.S. Armed Forces are working together on plans for a new kind of fort." My Weekly Reader for fifth graders reported that the military planned to shoot a fleet of rockets twenty-five thousand miles into space, where they would float together and serve as a platform from which to fire smaller rockets against enemy aggressors. The image of a "fort" conveyed the message that the planned militarization of space - a provocative and dangerous evolution in the geographic scope of warfare - was strictly intended for defensive and peaceful purposes.

While only mentioning the purely defensive military function of the space fort, the article assured students that the primary purpose of the technology was benign. These forts would be used as floating laboratories, brimming with scientific instruments for advancing human knowledge of the moon and the universe beyond. They would also solve more down-to-earth problems, such as weather forecasting and accurate mapmaking. My Weekly Reader and Current Events almost exclusively presented the image of the friendly rocket, a symbol of human advancement through technology.

Then in 1957 the shock of Sputnik forced Americans to distinguish between friendly rockets and deadly missiles. Few events have so unnerved the American nation as did the Soviet launching of a rocket that delivered a crude 184 pound satellite into earth orbit. Americans immediately understood that the technological ability to launch a satellite was essentially the same as that required to deliver a nuclear warhead. The point had been driven home that the United States was no longer invulnerable and "was in danger of being surpassed in military technology." This reality was "absorbed deeply into the national consciousness." To remind the world of the Soviet triumph, the communist-made moon transmitted a constant "beep, beep, beep," as if to mock American technological impotence.

My Weekly Reader and Current Events interpreted Sputnik as a sign that America was losing the space race, but they also made clear its military implications. "A rocket or missile [my emphasis] that powerful could take a hydrogen bomb anywhere on earth," a Current Event's article warned children. To their horror, children were informed that Russia "could pinpoint targets in the U.S. for her most deadly weapons." America now had to engage in two races - the space race and the arms race - and both superpowers invested significant portions of their wealth and credibility to outperform each other in both competitions.

Many decision-makers of the period now confess that the United States responded to a "missile gap" after Sputnik that did not actually exist. But the question of whether Sputnik represented a meaningful measure of long-term technological or military superiority of the Soviets in the cold war struggle was essentially irrelevant. The arms race would still have taken place, because Sputnik was perceived as a communist propaganda triumph that the United States imagined itself obligated to answer in kind. President Eisenhower initially minimized the meaning of Sputnik and tried to reassure Americans that they had little reason to doubt the military strength and determination of the United States. But the Soviet propaganda victory, coupled with renewed fears of nuclear Armageddon, strengthened the arguments of soap-box cold warriors.

Six days after the Sputnik launch, the National Security Council devoted an entire meeting to a "top secret" discussion of the adequacy of the United States Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) and Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) programs. President Eisenhower wondered if the United States should "resort to a Manhattan District approach" to speed up the development and deployment of both long-range and shorter-range ballistic missiles. The firing of an IRBM from 1500's mile would have an even greater intimidating effect on the Soviets, Eisenhower believed. The Soviet Union had to rely on ICBMs with a range of 6,000 miles to strike the United States. In contrast, United States bases flanking the Soviet Union afforded America the luxury of deploying nuclear missiles of a shorter range. During the course of the meeting, Eisenhower kept returning to the propaganda value that a first test of an American ICBM or IRBM would give the United States. "These political and psychological considerations," Eisenhower contended, "were perhaps even more important than the strictly military considerations."

When the United States finally tested its Jupiter Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, My Weekly Reader carried the news by including a copy of a May 1958 letter that had been recovered from the Jupiter nose cone. The publicity stunt of delivering mail via a ballistic missile disguised the real purpose of the technology. Addressed to General Maxwell Taylor, Chief of Staff of the United States Army, the letter hinted at the true capability of the missile: "This is the first 'rocket mail' to be carried by the Jupiter IRBM in a tactical warhead." [my emphasis] My Weekly Reader played along with the deception. Returning to its friendly rocket theme, the newspaper concluded: "Even speedier handling of mail is expected in the future."

Needless to say, the Army was not primarily concerned with new technologies for the punctual delivery of mail. Out of earshot of children, the United States planned for an acceleration of its ability to mail nuclear weapons to the heart of the Soviet Union.

America's cold war dread depended less on Soviet technological capabilities or the propaganda value of Sputnik than on American perceptions of Soviet foreign policy intentions. On January 9, 1958, Eisenhower delivered his annual State of the Union address to Congress. Although he never specifically referred to the Soviet Sputnik feat, he devoted much of his message to an assessment of post-Sputnik threats to U.S. national security. Eisenhower placed Sputnik in a cold war context. Sputnik was merely the latest manifestation of an ongoing belligerent Soviet foreign policy: "Now, the threat to our safety, and to the hope of a peaceful world is simply stated. It is communist imperialism," Eisenhower informed Congress. The Soviet Union, according to Eisenhower, had refined the art of modern war:

Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion. Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, the whole world of ideas - all are harnessed to this same chariot of expansion. The Soviets, in short, are waging total Cold War. [my emphasis]

When Eisenhower called for the United States to launch its own total cold war mobilization in the second half of his address, he stressed that this would require a tremendous sacrifice by all Americans, "perhaps most important of all - the student himself, with his bag of books and his homework." Eisenhower was alluding to a common belief that the United States could only compete with the Russians in the post-Sputnik era if its children dedicated themselves to careers as rocket and missile scientists.

One Beaumont, Texas sixth-grade class corresponded with the President to support his call for a major post-Sputnik effort to improve science education. All of the students clearly understood that America's cold war cause required young recruits, whose interest and training in science was to begin at an early age. Twelve-year-old Ginger Grobe wrote with simple patriotism to her president: "One of the ways we are trying to become better citizens is that we're trying not to be irrelevant. We also are studying other countries and comparing their life with ours. I would rather live in the United States." Ginger assumed that, "there are some boys and girls [my italics] in our room that may become great scientists."

My Weekly Reader and Current Events had already prepared children's reaction to Eisenhower's speech. The country's cold war enlistment of children for the Space Race became a coded language for talking war. Two years after Sputnik, a 1959 Current Events issue tallied the space race score, literally accompanying the front page article with a "Space Scoreboard." Despite all the frantic talk of a "missile gap," the scorecard revealed that the United States had successfully orbited thirteen satellites, as opposed to the Soviet's three Sputniks. Still, Current Events rifled the article, "WE REACH for the STARS: BUT Russia's Rockets Have a Longer Reach. What Are we Doing to Catch-up in the Race for Space?"

My Weekly Reader reported every Soviet achievement in a tone of shrill alarm. Humiliation fueled the newspaper's presumption that the United States lagged behind in the race for space. After all, the Soviets had achieved every space milestone first. My Weekly Reader reminded students that the Soviets had orbited the first satellite in space, beat the United States by two months in orbiting the sun, and had already crash-landed an unmanned vehicle on the moon. In 1959, Current Events quoted a NASA official's analysis of the meaning of the space race scorecard to date: "We cannot run second very long and still talk about leadership." Current Events seconded this observation with a war analogy. It quoted a Civil War general who had remarked: "The way to win is to get there fastest with the mostest." The essential lesson, Current Events instructed children, was that "in the race for space, they [the Soviets] have already won world prestige (pres-tezh': general admiration or esteem)."

The pervasive anticommunism of the era indulged an emotional hyperbole that mostly went unexamined. The children's newspapers echoed the prevailing cold war atmosphere in which Democrats and Republicans agreed on the basic tenets of the cold war. John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election because he convinced the American public that he, rather than Eisenhower and Nixon, did not - and would not - minimize the seriousness of the cold war threat.

My Weekly Reader reported that Kennedy would not shrink from acting decisively to regain any advantage that the Eisenhower administration had given away to the Soviet Union. John Kennedy triumphed over Richard Nixon, in part, because Americans believed his promise to restore American foreign policy credibility, which had been badly battered in the three years since Sputnik. My Weekly Reader and Current Events replied enthusiastically to Kennedy's challenge to the nation: "The President thinks we have been second to Russia long enough. This time, he hopes to be first. We are on our way."

Kennedy inspired My Weekly Reader and Current Events to redouble their efforts to teach children to become young cold warriors. Not that they had ever been remiss in their duty. They had already devoted part of each issue to cold war citizenship training. In 1956, Current Events launched a special edition for their weekly Civic Training section. They rifled the series "World in Conflict." In an accompanying supplement for teachers, Current Events developed a curriculum unit to aid teachers in "guiding your students to a sound understanding of these critical times."

Current Events preached an enlightened pedagogy. Rather than insulate children, the editors of the Civic Training section advocated exposing them to communist ideology, allowing them to understand the doctrine, its weaknesses, and its "appeal for those who embrace it." Having forwarded the principle of enlightened citizen responsibility in a democracy, Current Events then proceeded immediately to abandon this standard without the slightest blush of embarrassment. Yes, teachers should immerse children in world problems, but "correct" teaching should reinforce the cold war gospel and lead to a set of pre-determined conclusions:

Young Americans must be taught that democratic rights and privileges make up the foundation of all that the word America has come to mean throughout the world. They must also learn Communism's strengths and weaknesses in order to warn against its deceit and false promises. This special edition ... provides basic facts for making your students aware of the threat of Communism. It will help them to realize the importance of joining free men everywhere in a determined effort to halt the spread of this totalitarian doctrine which could destroy human freedom.

Even if a teacher had private doubts about preparing students to fight in America's cold war, an open discussion with students that undermined cold war assumptions would have been certain grounds for dismissal.

Space and weapons technology provided a dramatic point of superpower rivalry. Almost no aspect of American life, however, was spared comparison to Soviet communism. Given a nuclear stalemate (but at ever higher levels of missile numbers) and the inability of the superpowers to settle their differences on the battlefield, the war spread to a competition over which of two incompatible "systems" or "ways of life" was superior and more deserving of "winning" the cold war.

The world according to My Weekly Reader projected a Manichean struggle between good and evil. On one side stood the incarnation of evil, promoting a dangerous ideology, equipped with weapons of mass destruction, intent on conquering the world. Peering across the abyss was the United States, a moral democracy, defending the freedom of the individual and championing national self-determination. Two great revolutionary theories vied for supremacy, one a communist dictatorship, the other a capitalist democracy. The goal of both was the defeat of the other. All cold war details could be explained within this paradigmatic framework. American material abundance, according to My Weekly Reader, derived from its tradition of individual freedom, while bad harvests and a paucity of consumer goods in Russia were a natural outcome of an inefficient command economy, which penalized individual initiative and diverted resources to military preparations for global conquest. The term "third world" was invented to describe premodern nations which required military and goodwill foreign aid, because their impoverishment made them susceptible to communist misinformation. The Soviets only proposed nuclear disarmament measures, Americans said, for purposes of propaganda. Outer space became cold war territories, conquerable by whichever superpower proved technologically superior.

Not unlike a military campaign, the superpowers measured the cold war contest in land masses and in populations gained or lost by either side. My Weekly Reader kept careful track of how many nations and numbers of people fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. As many children of the era remember, the figures were usually accompanied with several "then and now" global maps showing "Moscow-controlled" areas in blood-red ink expanding menacingly, while the size of the area held by the beleaguered "free nations" appeared to shrink yearly.

My Weekly Reader and Current Events adhered to this world view throughout the 1950s and taught it to children in a language tailored to their youth. In a 1952 article entitled, "We Live in a Divided World," Current Events explained that the free world had defeated a "bad neighbor" during World War II and then hoped for peace. Unlike the United States, the Soviets did not demobilize their armies after the war. They proceeded to break "50 solemn treaties" and "swallowed up other nations." Once again, the "free nations" had to band together to "stop this new bad neighbor." Through no fault of the United States, Current Events declared, "We live in a divided world, part captive, part free. We live in a state of 'cold war.'"

The article went on to explain that the Soviet Union was a "neighborhood bully," too strong for the mature world to spank. To contain the delinquent behavior of the Soviets, the United States peacefully devised "weapons other than bullets." NATO, for example, was a "family" agreement between the United States and a free Europe to stand together to "police the neighborhood against any nation which might start trouble."

My Weekly Reader's and Current Event's elementary understanding of the cold war remained constant well into the 1960s. In a 1961 article, Current Events dropped the simplistic "neighborhood" metaphor, but again lectured children that the titanic clash with Communism was "much more than a military struggle, although guerrilla fighters, paratroopers, tanks, and nuclear weapons play an important role." The cold war had mostly been "fought relentlessly with economic and political weapons. Propaganda has been another weapon." Action had shifted from Europe to the Asian continent. So far, the United States had averted a major war with Russia, but Soviet designs to coerce or deceive African or Asian nations to submit to communism made these continents volatile points of superpower confrontation.

An accompanying map showed where the "RED ARMY REACHES OUT," and where the United States "as leader of the Free World" needed to "halt communist expansion directed from Moscow." Another 1961 article in Current Events explained why America considered no country insignificant in relation to its own national security. Two graphics accompanied the article. A map featured a gigantic China and North Vietnam, both colored communist red, dwarfing South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. The other illustration depicted an infinite line of falling dominoes. This front page cover story began with the headline: "REDS PLAY A DANGEROUS GAME: DEADLY DOMINOES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA." The first lines of this 1961 lesson explained to children, like Ron Kovic and his friends, why America would probably have to commit itself to a war in Vietnam:

What happens when you line up a row of dominoes and give them a push? Each domino acts on the other. Soon all the dominoes have toppled. ... The Russians and Red Chinese are giving a cruel push to the Southeast Asian domino countries now. The U.S. and its allies in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) are trying to keep them from falling behind the communist 'Bamboo Curtain.' What country is next in the Red's deadly domino game? The answer is already clear - South Vietnam.

Cold war propaganda became a lens through which youth were to understand their country and to orient their lives. A reading of the children's press of the period dramatizes the degree to which cold war complications were reduced to formulaic, interlocking assumptions about what meaning should be derived from world events.

No cold war event epitomized a more tragic loss of objectivity than did the Vietnam War. Oversimplification chained the nation to a wartime mentality that limited the range of choices available to foreign policy decision-makers. Having convinced itself that the Soviet Union had masterminded a decisive showdown on this exotic foreign ground, the United States eventually charged blindly into a cold war theater battle in Southeast Asia that it could not win.

My Weekly Reader, Current Events, and teachers practiced self-censorship. Blatant coercion was rarely necessary, because a normative world view existed that discouraged critical thinking, never mind dissent. But censorship also relied on a concerted effort to punish individuals and groups who deviated from a wartime mood that demanded the ideological mobilization of the entire American culture. Since children represented America's cold war future, governments, schools, and citizen vigilante groups subjected My Weekly Reader and the children's press in general to severe anticommunist scrutiny.

As late as 1963, for example, the school board of Levittown, the 1950s instant community on Long Island, New York where Ron Kovic was being raised, removed from its classrooms a book written by Emil Lengyel and published by Scholastic - the chief competitor of My Weekly Reader and Current Events - not for reason of its content, but on the grounds that a vigilant school board member found the author's name on a membership list of a suspected subversive communist organization. Accompanied by the editor of Scholastic, Lengyel faced his school board inquisitors and three-hundred spectators.

Lengyel delivered an impassioned 1,500 word statement detailing his faithful loyalty to America. Yes, he conceded, he was Hungarian born, but he became a naturalized United States citizen in 1927. When anti-fascist and pro-Ally popular-front organizations asked for his sponsorship during World War II, he had happily given it. But when he discovered that they were dominated by communists, he refused further permission to use his name. Now the good citizens of Levittown accused him of disloyalty.

Ironically, Lengyel informed his accusers that he had spent twenty months in a Siberian labor camp after he had served in the Hungarian army during the First World War. He had also published anticommunist books, one of which, 1000 Years of Hungary, the Soviet Union presently banned. Satisfied, the Levittown parents who filled the school auditorium gave Lengyel a "rousing applause." Nevertheless, by a margin of one vote, the school board voted to continue the ban.

Unlike Scholastic, neither of AEP's current events periodicals, My Weekly Reader or Current Events, ever incurred the wrath of any government agency, school district, or anticommunist group. Nevertheless, Terry Borden, a former editor-and-chief of My Weekly Reader, has recently stated that AEP naturally took notice whenever anticommunists targeted Scholastic. Scholastic and AEP were not only rivals, they were nervous colleagues in the same industry whenever anticommunism bared its teeth. Did AEP's My Weekly Reader and Current Events learn from Scholastic's free press battles? "You betcha," Borden responded without hesitation. As a result, My Weekly Reader understood that it was "treading a careful line and the easiest thing to do was to not do a story, not talk about it." My Weekly Reader escaped serving as a lightning rod for anticommunism, because it scrupulously avoided controversy.

The children's press contributed to a wartime atmosphere that made the Vietnam War and the post-Sputnik nuclear arms race all but inevitable. Given this conclusion, a crucial question remains. For many children, cold war propaganda determined their outlook indefinitely. But for others, it did not. If all children were raised and nurtured in a monolithic anticommunist world view, what explains the later 1960s youth rebellion against the cold war world according to My Weekly Reader?.

The answer derives from the truth that there is a limit to the effectiveness of propaganda in sustaining a culture's belief system. The longer it deviates from people's perception of reality, the more its foundation crumbles. The United States cold war paradigm could not hold forever. My Weekly Reader created a mythical American history, sanitized and distorted for the purpose of recruiting youth ideologically for the indefinite duration of the wan But the paper's world view proved especially vulnerable when these same children came of age and freely questioned its interpretation of the early cold war years.

Born on the Fourth of July at the dawn of the cold war in 1946, Ron Kovic's youthful enthusiasm for his nation's cold war crusade knew no bounds until he charged off to Vietnam, took a bullet, and was shipped unceremoniously back home to Levittown in a wheelchair. He and many others of his generation could not help asking themselves, "for what?," when they heard the adults of a divided nation bickering over this same question. Ron Kovic's small sacrifice seemed either forgotten or despised.

Ron Kovic's remembrances, even if romanticized in the telling, do capture a common experience of many of America's cold war children. The pages of Born on the Fourth of July recount the political life of a child aspiring to adulthood, who traveled a path from innocent patriotic idealism to cynical disillusionment. This journey, taken by millions of cold war youths, eventually shattered the cold war consensus that glued the country together during the 1950s and early 1960s. When this veteran of war and other children of his generation later challenged the cold war's underlying premises, the national unity upon which the cold war consensus depended disappeared almost overnight.

The protracted Vietnam War triggered the intellectual disillusionment of many youth with United States' cold war policies. But turning idealistic patriots into rebels also required an emotional ingredient. Sputnik had already added the element of fear to children's disenchantment with the prevailing cold war catechism. Visions of nuclear-tipped missiles streaking towards each child's Main Street, U.S.A. intensified cold war youth's sense of morbid vulnerability.

This pervasive uneasiness added spice to the cauldron of simmering protest. Not since the Civil War would the nation endure a period of such political and social polarization. Tragically, My Weekly Reader - like the rest of the nation - paid an exorbitant price for suspending its objectivity while rallying children to the country's cold war mission. Having joined the propaganda stampede for the long duration of the cold war, My Weekly Reader traded away its claim to legitimate cultural authority. In the end, it had failed America's children. To children who would know better, My Weekly Reader imparted the story of an unsimple world, simply told.

NOTES

For a complete set of notes please contact Kira Brunner at Monthly Review, 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001.

Marc Richards received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. He is currently teaching at Western Washington University.

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