Slide Sets

Introduction

During the height of the early Cold War, journalistic cartography played a powerful role in reflecting and influencing Americans' attitudes toward the Red Menace. In popular magazines such as Time, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post, maps routinely accompanied stories dealing with Cold War politics. Additionally, cartographic images of the threat of Communist expansion and domination also accompanied advertisements in these popular publications.

Most such maps have typically been classified as propaganda maps. As a result, they have frequently been excluded from studies of the history of cartography precisely because, as propaganda maps, academic cartographers have widely viewed them as clearly antithetical to the map-making canon, which is supposed to be made up of items that are not only scientifically based but completely and transparently objective. John Pickles, in his article "Text, Hermeneutics, and Propaganda Maps," sums up this view of cartography in the following terms: "Map making and map reading are seen to involve the straightforward transmittal of information in a philosophically and practically unproblematic manner. In particular, cartography does not seek to persuade, to convince or to argue; it does not select techniques of representation on the basis of their visual impact; and in the choice of subject matter, what is centered on the page, what is consigned to the edge of the map, and which scale and projection shall be used, the cartographer is guided by rules of scientific procedure and convention" (197).

Clearly, propaganda maps would be problematic items within such a worldview. By revealing the biases and ideological bents present within a given publication, society, and/or individual, they expose the possibility that all maps are ideologically tainted and potentially charged with emotion rather than the products of pure reason most people imagine them to be. Conversely, of course, one of the values of Cold War propaganda maps was that, since people did usually regard all maps as purveyors of unadulterated truth, they would be the more likely to accept the messages on propaganda maps as objective truth too.

Further, as Pickles argues, propaganda maps of the Cold War are, indeed, excluded from the traditional cartographic canon because they not only do not disguise the act of interpretation on the part of the mapmaker, they actually forefront it. In this connection, Pickles discusses the deployment of stock Red Menace images such as the Russian Bear within a larger discourse of anti-Communist imagery. Through the use of stock images, and also through the use of significant absences, as we will see in some examples, Cold War mapmakers created complex images of what seems on the surface, the simple ideological dialectic Capitalism Vs. Communism, but which, when examined closely, reveals a complexity of attitudes toward Communism and the Soviet Union.

As Susan Schulten argues in her book The Geographical Imagination in America, World War II represented a pivotal point in the history of American cartography. On one level, due to the scope of the war, to an unprecedented extent, popular audiences suddenly found themselves drawn to a concern with geographical locations. Schulten states that "War had made geography a consumer product" (228). Secondly, the war modified the general geographical worldview, at least temporarily: that worldview ceased to be one almost exclusively based on the Mercator projection. In this regard, the influence of Richard Edes Harrison on journalistic cartography in such popular magazines as Time and Newsweek, developed during the Second World War, continued into the early Cold War years. The visual shift from the isolative suggestivity of the Mercator map to the interdependence one of Harrison-style maps fit in well with Cold War cartography since, as Schulten argues, maps could serve to "ominously suggest the proximity of North America to the Soviet Union."

In this slide set, we look at several types of Cold War journalistic maps, beginning first with an examination of popular advertisements that employed Cold War cartographic imagery to promote their particular product or service.

The second group of Cold War maps we examine falls squarely into the category of popular-journalist cartography. This group of maps we have labeled metaphor maps. Of course, all maps are to some extent metaphors: map readers tend to forget that maps are simply visual constructs bearing conventional relationships to given spaces, rather than being the actual spaces themselves. We are prone to think and talk about maps as if they were the spaces they symbolize. Indicating that one thing is another is the essence of metaphor. Metaphor contrasts with simile, an indication that one things shares characteristics with another. One could, for example, state in a simile that a given person is very much like a ball of fire, features perceived as shared by the two entities concerned causing the person to be considered as a very dynamic character. The metaphor version of such a statement is much stronger. It states that the person concerned is a ball of fire. In part because such a statement clearly constitutes a lie, the irony involved gets the metaphor more attention that the corresponding simile would. Metaphor maps feature representational lies. Unlike maps that have representations of houses on them that accurately suggest that in the real space symbolized there actually are houses, metaphor maps have on them items that do not directly correspond with any physical item on the real space represented. The readers of such maps, of course, know that such is the case, but, all the same, have their attention drawn to the truth implications behind the representational lies.

Our third group of maps deals with what we have termed redeemable communists. In these cases, the violent red usually associated with Cold War-era maps featuring the USSR, China, and other Soviet bloc countries is absent. These maps seem to indicate an ambiguity present in journalistic cartography with regard to these particular regions.

Advertising Maps

· Grumman Aircraft (Image 1)

Maps in magazine advertisements were often employed during the early Cold War years for strong anti-Communist effect, an effect brought about in a variety of different ways. Our first was printed in the 5 January 1953 edition of Life, and is an advertisement for the Grumman aircraft engineering company; however, the connection between the commercial agenda of the corporation and the continuation of the Cold War is in this case explicitly illustrated through allusion to a fantasy-possible bombing of the Soviet Union. It is clear that two of the very bellicose-looking planes constructed by the company have just flown in from North Korea after engaging in a bombing raid. However, the dark forcefulness of the map itself and the words of the accompanying text reminder that the target, Aoji, is only twelve miles from Russian Siberia make a powerful suggestion of the aircraft's potential for aggressive action against the Soviet Union. Like many advertisements of the 1950s, this one served to remind US readers to stay motivated against their main contemporary enemy. Grumman would have been unlikely to expect the ordinary reader to buy any of its products directly, though in Grumman's case, the public would have understood at once what those products were. Almost certainly, Grumman's imagined it would do no harm to have the voters on its side when it came to decisions over military appropriations.

· Rand McNally and Mercator (Image 2)

Interesting and ironically amusing to professional and amateur cartographers alike will be the fact that even the staid Rand McNally company got into the anti-Communist advertising picture. Thus our second example, which is taken from the Time magazine issue of February 12, 1951, is a Rand McNally ad pretending to lambaste Mercator as the man who made Russia look so big. In this case, of course, though the advertisement, like the others, does serve to reinforce readers' continuing awareness of Cold War perils, its didactic agenda was probably in some ways more effective than the others, especially to readers who were cartographically inclined, because it pulses with the ironic humor of an imaginative cartographic conundrum. Sophisticated readers would, of course, have noted that Mercator did, in fact, make Russia look bigger than it should objectively look-Russia, not the USSR, which is the anachronism involved here. The Rand McNally company was clearly being self-indulgent here, taking advantage of the situation to teach the general public a little elementary cartography, even as it was delighting their patriotism and to some extent allaying their fears by cutting Russia down to size. The advertisement is couched in moderate dispassionate language, indirectly encouraging readers to get objective facts about the enemy by buying the company's products, doing this in part through an organic graph articulating the interrelation of Mercator's projection with a globe, perhaps thereby indirectly trying to wean the readership away from its reliance on a commonly held perception: that Mercator projections are transparently objective.

Metaphor Maps

· Antwerp as a Colossal Octopus Pump (Image 3)

This example, taken from Life magazine for 26 January 1953, well illustrates the power of Cold War metaphor maps. It features an interesting variation of what Pickles sees as a familiar figure in the rhetoric of the propaganda map, the image of the octopus, which in this case highlights the danger of independently-minded Western Europeans collaborating in any way with East European communists. Here twin metaphors of a pump and an octopus, in the guise of an impossibly surreal combination of a colossal flame-red pump that is also a colossal octopus, are posed as if replacing or superimposed upon the real-world Antwerp. This fantastic threatening creature is pumping a variety of military items from the West into Eastern Europe, principally Communist East Germany.

The complex map metaphors featured cogently illustrate Cold War fears. The black icons identify the items being clandestinely transported. The thug and soldier pictograph at Vienna illustrates contemporary fears of traitors and spies. Text accompanying the map states that there were then people actually making personal gain by shipping strategically important materials to Communist countries, even though thereby radically endangering Western security.

· Europe From Moscow (Image 4)

This example, a map entitled "Europe From Moscow," which is reproduced from Time magazine for March 10, 1952, is also metaphorical, depicting the creeping red-blood flow of Communism running downhill and threatening to engulf all of Europe. The perspective and progressively diminishing color intensities on the map suggest that the blood-or communism flowing through the shedding of blood-will be seeping downhill from the USSR into Spain, and indeed even into Africa. Of course, no matter how much actual blood would be spilled in such an operation, it wouldn't be enough to literally cover all the real-world ground suggested by the map and nor would the fact that all the countries concerned would become rules by communists actually stain the earth of those countries red. The metaphor here is reinforced because the indication of north on the map is towards the right, the USSR thus being shown on the bottom and Spain on the top, a twist of the usual cartographic conventions, and, since Mercator tends to seem synonymous with transparent truth, a lie reinforcing a lie. The effective psychological strategy demonstrated by this map is an illustration of the powerfully innovative propaganda work achieved by R.M.Chapin, the primary cartographer for political maps in Time.

· Korean War "Squeeze" (Image 5)

Our final metaphor map is entitled "Squeeze" and is from Time magazine for 2 October 1950. It is shocking because obviously in the actual terrain of Korea it would have been impossible to find the monstrous vise shown on the map, a vise that stretched from the Pusan perimeter in the southeast almost to Inchon in the northwest. The map lie concerned does, however, constitute what would have been seen at the time as a strikingly ironic metaphor. The Reds had almost squeezed the South Koreans and their allies into the sea at Pusan. If they had succeeded, they would have put the entire peninsula under communist control. However, the daring McArthur's Inchon landing turned the tables and had the effect of causing the Reds in turn to be squeezed-between two United Nations armies.

Redeemable Communists

· The Trieste Problem (Image 6)

This example concerns the Trieste crisis of the early 1950s, which involved capitalist Italy and communist Yugoslavia-ostensibly a Cold War problem. However, orthodox Cold War cartographic conventions are ignored: instead of red being used for Yugoslavia, the map (Time, August 3, 1953) uses blue.

Italy and Yugoslavia had rival claims to the territory located on their shared Adriatic-coast border. Tito's Yugoslavia, though Communist, had, however, broken with Stalin's Iron Curtain bloc and been declared a traitor to the Red cause. The West wished to woo Yugoslavia to keep it from returning to the Soviet camp, but did not want to alienate Italy. Contemporary magazine articles support Tito's non-aligned stance, and contemporary map representations of Yugoslavia rarely color it any shade of red or pink. Indeed, in Trieste Crisis-related maps, Italy and Yugoslavia usually got identical treatment: the West wanted and finally succeeded in getting the dispute settled amicably.

· The Guatemala Problem (Image 7)

Similar visual ambiguity is displayed in a map dealing with Guatemala which accompanies an article on Guatemala published in the May 11, 1953 issue of Time magazine. This map too is devoid of lurid reds. Perhaps the United States and its allies hoped that some settlement of the internal political turmoil characterizing the state at this time could be achieved without either a bloody civil war breaking out or the communists gaining absolute control over the country.

In fact, in Guatemala, a general strike in 1944 led to rule by military junta. Organized labor became an important political factor in Guatemalan politics and for the first time the Communist Party enjoyed a period of unhampered growth in the country. This situation led, however, to another coup in 1954, and a pattern of political instability set in.

1. In Life, 5 January 1953. pp.40-41.
2. InTime, 12 February 1951. p.36. © by RMC, R. L. 02-S-41. www.randmcnally.com.
3. "Antwerp." In Life, 26 January 1953. p.27.
4. "Europe to Moscow." In Time, 10 March 1952. p.39. © 1952 Time Inc. Reproduced by permission.
5. "Squeeze." In Time, 2 October 1950. p.18. © 1950 Time Inc. Reproduced by permission.
6. "Troubled Trieste." In Time, 3 August 1953. p.28. © 1953 Time Inc. Reproduced by permission.
7. Time Inc. Reproduced by permission.

Works Cited

"Antwerp." Life 26 Janurary 1953: 27.

"Europe to Moscow." Time 10 March 1952: 39.

"Grumman Aircraft Engineering Company." Life 5 January 1953: 40-41.

"Guatemala." Time 11 May 1953: 45.

Pickles, John. "Text, Hermeneutics, and Propaganda Maps," Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. Eds. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan. London: Routledge, 1992.193-230.

Rand-McNally Company Advertisment. Time 12 Februrary 1951: 36.

Schulten, Susan. The Geographical Imagination in America. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001.

"Squeeze." Time 2 October 1950: 18.

"Troubled Trieste." Time 3 August 1953: 28.