Cold War Kansas - Dr. Erik Scott; Unknown

i'm kate mcintyre today on k pr presents the cold war in the heartland that's the latest project of dr eric scott he's the director of the university of kansas center for russian east european and eurasian studies i just got thank you for joining us today here in kansas we i often think of us in the midwestern plain states as being a look isolated from world events geopolitics and the cold war you argue that's just not the case yeah that's right and one other thing i want to do in that project has really center the heartland in the history of the cold war i think there's a tendency for people outside the rich and also people in the midwest like to think of as play says as disconnected from global events as insulated from global event says has purely american and i'm changing now but in fact i found in my research on this project that there are actually a few places with a cold war had as big an impact as the american midwest he really change everything from the attitudes of people in the region towards the government

hired to the actual landscape of the region onto the vast imprint of the military now throughout the midwest i really had an imprint on the region and the imprint in many ways i continues to be seen and to be very probable today professors guide at one tiny kansas hosted more icy be on this intercontinental ballistic missiles than any other state in the country that happen that's a very good question and the other girl sort of ideas about why this was the case but i think it really boils down to the fact that there was a space to put the man there was general support for for these kinds of establishments in kansas rallies not push back against them hands and as imaginary them were established under an idea through political networks of basin the region that betty abroad a government spending military spending two to kansas and other states but it is really kind of amazing that these

these icy be on site says intercontinental ballistic missile sites were established and the other inmates can still be found throughout the region and in fact one of the really cool features we have on the website is is a tor of an abandoned a missile site now located just outside lawrence and you really would know it was there if you just were driving by about one of my graduate students marjorie go whaling work with me on the project i used to maps two to look at the site and i went out there and photographed and you can see side by side images of the site as it was i was i developed an emma looks like now overgrown with weeds but nevertheless you can see see the scientists who there was one of one of many many sites throughout the state and across the region professor scott talk to me about the kinds of information that you include in your cold war heartland one site so as a mentally really wanna do is is get beyond what you can find a

wikipedia get beyond what you can find through looking up cold war topics on line is really not discount heroes not really available elsewhere there are a lot of really great sides to have had information on that the cold war is his experience at the national level of your the national level but really we really wanted to gather materials from from a local community so we have documents from the walk into the exam and that the dollars to for politics these documents include i the materials a citizen groups who are were active in and citizen the policy during the cold war include so the records of senator bob dole who played a really vital role in establishing trade relations with with with the soviet union it includes all oral histories that were conducted how whiz local a local farmers people who were students here in kansas during the cold war ii it also it also includes a

deep hailed case studies of local landscape so in addition to the the missile sites which i mentioned there are features on an atomic cloud the end in the midwest and this was in ohio and also the important role that the topeka regional airport played in the cold war and i was really in forbes field but as for forbes field of the us has says the site mentioned has gone by by many names over the years high and so we have a case studies are showing the house knows this is regional airport came to do to play a pivotal role in and for a time was was reacted as is as a strategic air command for the cold war and and this is this is one of many instances love of the cold war really having a profound impact on on the region's landscape and on its infrastructure i'm visiting with

dr eric scott he's the director of cage center for russian east european and eurasian studies his latest project is the cold war in the heartland as longtime listeners of keep your prisons may remember we were in a key pierre presents special several years ago marking the thirtieth anniversary of the made for tv film the day after it was we've featured interviews with many of the local residents who played extras in that movie but just not talk to me about the role of kansas and lawrence particularly in that movie sure i think this is a great example of the heartland day in kansas in particular or cancer standing in for the harlem in the heartland standing in for the average american environment of the average american town knew this movie was was secular lawrence because lawrence could represent and in the end the film smalltown usa and died and it was a huge effort to fill

most hand and i know kbr has has done some some work on this in the past awe but it is really striking how he eagerly lawrence since participated in the killing of this movie and then the howl howl at it how what an impact it had president reagan famously cited this film is one of the things that really changed his attitude toward nuclear deterrence and you have this really profound change in the republican presidents attitude going from one of pursuing rather aggressive moves against the soviet a chalice of union into to actually working with with soviet leader mikhail gorbachev within a few years of this film to date the two actually hope to to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether there's a scene in the movie the day after i don't know if you remember the spread and they're in the barbershop this is before the nuclear attack has happened and and the news is playing in the

background and there's a back and forth between the guys giving their haircuts about whether or not we need to pay attention to what's happening and someone says something along the lines of oh we don't have to pay attention to that here out in the middle of nowhere that's right and this is actually this leads to the court which which is a first feature on our website which is which is that the character played by john lithgow our sponsors no nowhere anymore a meeting that we can't simply ignore our global events because we're here and cantor's far beyond the coasts and far away from from the rest of the world and end this year the school's quote i think is a really interesting one that speaks to the mythology of the midwest as a place of sort of wine changing an invention you know insulated i'm in this film was that was a clear appeal to change that that perception but i also think you know through this this product we see that in fact in the cold war there was no

nowhere any more the model of the way people are mobilized the impact the corps had a culture on the economy really was inescapable and really you know if those two allies in many different ways now i think if you look at it up close you can see that what you find doesn't always conform to what you expect of the cold war we think of the cold war has a release or the division of the world into communism and capitalism really to the bipolar oppositional our world but i think you know what you well you look at that what you see when you look at her up close here in kansas is my baby these suppose it divides of overtime period don't entirely lineup for example that there's a real blurry line between the global on the local hour talking about your strategic air command that's your base in topeka an incident according to the

region also very important national strategy also i would say some of the divisions between liberals and conservatives and we expect to find in the cold war ii in the research i did on the grain trade how which which was it became vitally important for a fur farmers in kansas now you really see debates about this high not neatly lining up what you expect them to be at the spot we know and where we think we know about liberals or conservatives in fact that initially wall wald baum there are many cancers farmers who were held deeply anti communist use in and refuse to sell grade or two you don't oppose this the celebration to the soviet union in the nineteen sixties by the late nineteen seventies an early nineteen eighties though when president jimmy carter the place an embargo on the sale we can still union over the city is invasion of afghanistan this year really struck a blow

today to the kansas economy was one of the key factors leading to the farm crisis early nineteen eighties and in fact it's republicans who were the most hawkish i came in confronting was a union that actually i come out in favor of ending the embargo and restoring economic trade out with his of being including the grain trade and senator bob dole and and president reagan who made it a key a key feature of his of his campaign played a crucial role in doing that sets an example where i you know we think of as our republican or democrat or a conservative or liberal dont necessarily line up and you see these pieces into relationships between the safe reasonable cancers farms and soviet markets you might not expect politics does make strange bedfellows actually i'm visiting with eric's got he's the director of pew's center for russian east european and eurasian studies has launched a new website called war in the heartland that just that as a historian how did you

become interested in this period in american history of a part of that for me was growing up at the tail end of the cold war and really as a as a as a young person thinking about us every relationship relations a different way our a certain way and then seeing that relationship for family transformed by the collapse of of love of the warsaw pact that the fall of berlin wall the the breakup of the soviet union and so i really i really in many ways is a thing that is that that got me interested in his study russia to begin with that his product was was callow usual one for me i should mention for several reasons i usually i get on the plane and travel halfway around the world to do my research i do are working in russia and ukraine and georgia how i'm digging through soviet era archives

set to to unpack the history and so this was really a different product for me and that it did involve getting on a plane for chile coincided with a pandemic so this is research that i could actually do without getting on a plane and i am appalled really taking a closer look at the global imprint of the things i've been studying in in our own backyard here in kansas and then the other thing was very different for me is that this usually you know what i do as a historian my research in terms of there are the books that i worked on is that it does this research is a very solitary endeavor and it usually involves me up or to documents and sitting in my room or my office an end and writing about them other this is really a collaborative effort and see i worked with a team of love graduate students accuracy of kansas are really played a huge role in andrea's site from a

highway with me and annie going out and doing interviews and tracking down documents and taking pictures of of course sites throughout the region it's also a website that's a little more public facing than some of the other stuff i do it's it's really designed for anyone who's interested in the cold war and the game we've got a lot of great feedback on a great stories too from people who who've read certain things that we have foreseen certain documents and wanted to share their own memories about the cold war but it's also designed as some english teachers can use in the classroom and i think this is really important because you know we we have a generation of students miserably my undergraduates at the interest of kansas have no memory of the soviet union most were born after so union collapsed and then enter the cold war and then high school and middle

school students of course even less and so the cold war is still a very important part of how history is taught in in middle school and high school but again it's usually something very distant it's usually about something happening in cuba or in vietnam and these are all very important things but i really want to convey through this howl history how global history shapes into jules they're spread thousands of miles away from each other and he read howl how these events seep into every day life in ways you might not expect well as a historian who has studied the soviet and russian history for much of your career what do you feel like you've learned from this project i mean i think i learned a lot of things it's just been fighting too to that image on it and a specialist in russian city has resisted been fined to look at in some ways at the flipside of what i

normally studying i've been in moscow i look through the archives of the communist party of the soviet state i looked at how the arc are the records of the the soviet foreign ministry and seen these statements and debates about policy towards us and so here i'm seeing the other side of things calm but but another thing that i think i've learned hands bizarre and not as i've found but also other other stories were working on a cold war now it is in many ways it makes sense to to look at the cold war has a profoundly global of ads as one way which you know it you cannot simply look at events in moscow or or elsewhere the soviet in isolation what's happening and in this part of the takes one step further cause i'm not really trying to bring together perspectives from from political leaders of all sides i'm also trying to to weave ordinary her chances and others of other inhabitants of

the harlot into and to this global story in and show how their laws were were bound up that up and in this broader the historical narrative for those of us who don't study this is a subject and don't have that particular expertise but maybe you know a little bit about the cold war what do you think we often get wrong about this period was you're hinting at in some ways you know we think it's a prickly miss bipolar here clearly divided world in which there are actually a lot of interconnections including economic connections as you mentioned but also cultural political connections how i think we think of a clear ideological divides off both between capitalism and communism or also the mansion in the us between conservatives and liberals and those those get blurry look at them up close out we think of of the us and so he knows very different places than many ways

and they are but this conflict also really shapes it shapes the other hand in some ways they've made they do come to resemble each other by this must this prolonged heard of conflict it is in both both cases you have vast expanses of military power as imagine vast expanses of educational institutions now you have institutions set up like they can use center for russian east european eurasian studies which i'm the director of an artist out of the city and you have the centers for the study of the united states and canada in the soviet union and so there is a the preoccupation out with the other side and so in some ways it's it said serve their rivalry with is a there's a higher level of intimacy i would say that in this rivalry and and i would say that this continues to take shape out how the us and russia really had to reach her today in this is one of things that we've been looking at night connection with a website

hi and this is this is thanks to the generous support the us russia foundation we've had a speaker series where we look at tight connections and relations between the us and so you know in the us and russia and looked at how ideas about the cold war really have outlasted the conflict itself and then continue to be very very important time when thirty years after after it said that all of his discussion about a new cold war between russia and united states i think that in many ways wald the us russia relationship is extremely tense and hand there is certainly hi little animosity in competition between these two two countries i would say that that in many ways this is a backward looking idea that is in some ways appealing to people on both sides at the appeals to americans because it makes

cass russia an enemy and familiar terms and this idea of a good versus evil you know capitalism vs com isn't you know russia's sterling no longer communist it really appeals people make sense of people and also we're works in russia has as a real as it would've been for for president vladimir putin to mobilize is his public by a bye join the rushes is standing up for those dates i think the world is much more complicated that we have a more bipolar world lots of different states competing calm but there is there was and i would say had his doubts about the cold war ii and it's really striking a match on isis was before but i think it's really worth repeating it's striking how much soviet symbols coal where are representations of the us in russia and in russia and the us have really lingered half for decades for decades after the the end of the cold war conflicts over this is really striking is as i

mentioned there is no longer a clear cut ideological opposition between the us and russia have their goals couples countries the other day russia's is just about thirty years after after it the collapse the soviet union whole generation is of people grow up without this and yet these these symbols really seem enduring legacies the core i really seem to be to have a hallowed really kissing afterlife a long long long after the superpower competition there's a bit i'd been visiting with professor eric scott he's the director of the center for russian eastern european and eurasian studies at the university of kansas back to scott thank you so much for visiting with us to find out more about dr scot project that cold war heartland doug kaye you that edu and j mak entire k pr present is a production of kansas public

radio at the university of kansas