"7 This is because he mentions the importance of freedom, something I will draw back to the constitution and explain the relevance of in this essay. .
When developing my research I came across this cartoon from the New York Times in 1949.8 The message is clearly that coming from an American point of view it has to hold up the world through a globalisation of its ideas and way of life, in order to keep the world out of the hands of the USSR and Stalin. The headline; "Uncle Atlas hasn't much choice.", not only shows Uncle Sam as a heroic Greek figure with the strength to hold up the world, but also shows that there was an unwillingness from the American government, or at least the people, to engage in more international warfare. Therefore I decided to look at the early years of the Cold War and to see where the change in attitude had come from, and how both Truman and Eisenhower's government used American exceptionalism to rally support at home and as part of their policies in international engagement. In answering the question "In what ways was the concept of American Exceptionalism evident in the Cold War during the years 1947-1961?" I intend to start by looking at the root of the idea and how its history manages to evoke passionate responses of American Nationalism in the transition period between the end of World War One and the Cold War. I also intend to study how Truman used these for his foreign policy pursuits. I shall then move onto the Cold War itself, identifying the use of exceptionalism in three key areas; warfare (with specific focus on the Korean War), an ideological persuasion of weak nations (particularly the vulnerable west Germany) and finally in political negotiation and discourse between Khrushchev and Eisenhower. .
The Constitution's Involvement in Exceptionalism.
However before I can analyse the role played by exceptionalism in the early part of the Cold War, I must first look at the root of the idea and how much prevalence it had in the minds of the American people.