Disease Dialogues: How Medical Language Impacted the Lavender Scare

Abstract

Disease is a fickle thing, often it silently slips from person to person, casually stalking just below the radar and calculating the next victim. Before long an epidemic is on hand and containment becomes the primary focus. A silent, paralyzing fear of illness is an arguable hallmark of the Cold War period. In this era, dialogues on disease and infection permeate every facet, from social developments, to cultural artifacts, to medical research, and most notably to politics. In this era, the prevalence of medical vernacular and disease dialogues became ever present in political discourse, as leaders from Roosevelt to Eisenhower discussed the threat of "ailments" that could cripple the United States. But in the 1950s, a new threat so great, yet so undetectable, threatened to infect the healthy body politic. Political discourse filled with dread over the development of Communist States and the threat to the United States' vitality. As the dialogue developed, an association between communism and disease formed in the early stages in of the Cold War. This view held that the American capitalist system was a healthy body being threatened by the "communist disease." The United States was understood to be under attack by the nefarious disease of communism. Keeping within a medical framework, the immune system of the United States needed to be secured, through identification of threats, shoring up protection, and keeping vital functions safe. Therefore, the alignment of medical and political dialogue in the early part of the century arguably laid the framework for the Lavender Scare, which acted as a treatment to protect the United States against the new threat of communism.

Disease Dialogues: How Medical Language Impacted the Lavender Scare by David James Ward Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License