Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 106

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Popular Culture Review

effort to maintain civilization” (207). Wylie argues that if all Americans begin to
act like Mike Hammer, “the Soviets could take us over without dropping a bomb”
(207). This leads Wylie to conclude that “Mike Hammer is like an enemy agent, a
real foe of us all” (209). While Wylie’s comments appear outrageous today. One
L on ely N igh t do t s affirm the ability of a lone individual to battle the Soviet enemy
single-handedly. Mike Hammer does encourage the reader to realize what all
Americans should know: that the Soviets are stupid and weak, and the seduction of
Communism is easily exposed as fraudulent.
Perceptions of the Soviet Union in the Fifties operated within a contradiction
that, on the one hand, saw them as more intelligent than Americans, and, on the
other, saw them as more primitive than Americans. The image of a backward,
primitive Russia predominated postwar perceptions of Communism. As Ellen
Schrecker argues, postwar spy hunts were predicated on the notion that only through
stolen information could the Soviets compete in the nuclear arms race: “Otherwise,
how was it possible for the Soviet Union, which was viewed as a backward, barbaric
nation, to have built a bomb?” (32). In an essay entitled “How You Can Fight
Communism,” James F. O’Neil portrays the Soviets as people who use progress as
a mask to hide their barbaric totalitarian impulses: “Next the salesmen and peddlers
themselves must be skillfully disguised, deodorized, and glamorized. Hence
Communists always appear before the public as ‘progressives’” (qtd. in Schrecker
110). For J. Edgar Hoover, communism was a disease that threatened to degenerate
freedom, democracy, religion, and the American Dream. Exposure to it resulted in
devolution. In Hoover’s view, communism “reveals a condition akin to disease
that spreads like an epidemic and like an epidemic a quarantine is necessary to
keep it from infecting the Nation” (qtd. in Schrecker 119-120). This perception of
communism as infectious spanned the political spectrum. In a 1952 campaign
speech, Adlai Stevenson commented that communism was “a disease which may
have killed more people in this world than cancer, tuberculosis, and heart disease
combined” (qtd. in Sayre 201). For Raymond B. Allen, communists should not
teach in universities because their totalitarian beliefs threaten the evolution of
American democracy: “Communism would substitute a doctrine of fear, of little
faith, and would submerge the human spirit to the vicious ends of a crass
materialism” (7).
In a mid-1950s study which evaluated Am ericans’ attitudes toward
communism, Samuel Stouffer discerned a belief among the majority of the people
surveyed that “the less educated and working-class people were more likely to be
communists than the better-educated and white-collar people” (172). In addition
to a belief in communists as ignorant, Stouffer related that 1950s Americans believed
communists were morally corrupt, respondents labeling them “queer people” and
“warped personalities” (175). In Harry Horner’s sf film R e d Planet M ars (1952),