Selling an animated American way. Sutherland’s conservative, free-enterprise propaganda in early Cold War America.

Many scholars continue to understand the American Way of Life as America’s monolithic belief system of national unity in the early Cold War period. This master’s thesis, however, follows recent historians who have shed light on the cultural struggle over the definition of America’s post-World War II national ideology. It does so by looking at how rightist and corporate groups used animated films to promote an American Way that helped them to further their agenda and denigrate the version of Americanism brought forward by their political opponents. The animated propaganda cartoons were produced by Hollywood film producer John Sutherland and commissioned by the rightist red-baiter George Benson and by conservative business organizations between 1948 and 1959. This research project examines how these films interpreted the American Way of Life, how this animated vision of America was related to the way different U.S. social groups constructed their version of Americanism, and how the motion pictures were produced, sponsored, distributed, and received. As has been shown, Sutherland’s animation belonged to the propaganda weapons with which rightist leaders and conservative corporations attempted to counter the progressive reforms and demands of New Deal-Fair Deal liberals, farm and labor unionists, and women’s and civil rights activists in order to restore the hegemony they lost to the New Deal order of the Great Depression. Screened throughout the nation in movie theatres or on TV, as well as in companies, patriotic seminars, and educational institutions, Sutherland’s animated cartoons were designed to help conservative politicians and free-market advocates to regain leverage because they exploited the fear of Communist subversion to promote a national anti-Communist consensus that was conducive to free-enterprise principles and rightist American beliefs. The motion pictures were constructed to bring about this conservative consensus since they sold the American public on an animated American Way of Life in which economic liberties enabled U.S. citizens to achieve the American Dream, free-enterprise principles facilitated U.S. industries to create unprecedented affluence, the exceptional and measurable abundance was shared by Americans from all walks of life, Communism was othered as the totalitarian and non-human counter-world, New Dealers and Fair Dealers were vilified as Communist villains, and the lifestyles of powerful white businessmen, white male suburban breadwinners, and white consumerist housewives were represented as normative. In terms of diachronic differences, the shift from the blatant anti-New Dealism of the early cartoons commissioned by Benson (1948-1953) to the full embrace of People’s Capitalism and technological progress by the later industrial cartoons (1952-1959) was indicative of the changing propaganda strategies of free enterprise-friendly opinion shapers. The missing attacks against progressive reforms of the later cartoons were probably the reason why the left-leaning press favorably reviewed their entertaining quality. By contrast, leftist journalists criticized Sutherland’s early cartoons for discriminating non-white Americans, advocating Smithian economics, and denigrating Fair Deal reforms. The conservative press, in turn, praised all of Sutherland’s films for promoting U.S. freedom and free-market economics in an amusing way.