The Eisenhower Blues: Returning GIs and Racial Masquerade in Post-War American Film and Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers cross-racial encounters as well as racial mimicry and masquerade in works from the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that thrillers and other works of popular culture prove fertile ground for tracking the intersections of race and masculinity. Popular cultural texts of the period present a surprisingly uniform and articulate resistance to the consolidation of consensus culture. Pulp and paperback fiction reflect a crisis of assimilation on the part of returning white soldiers, depicting their predicament in the rhetoric of alienation and existential despair. Male protagonists resist their socially designated roles as responsible, married, breadwinning members of the managerial and professional classes. In novels by writers ranging from Nelson Algren to Richard Yates, prosperity is depicted as variously undesirable, unachievable, or too loathsome a burden to bear. Movies by directors such as Jules Dassin and John Huston lament the sacrifices men are seemingly compelled to make to enter into middle-class respectability. In these works, African American characters figure as “authentic bearers of alienation.” Consequently, the hard-boiled and noir melodramas of male “self-reliance” typically featured white protagonists navigating highly “racialized” and/or ethnic social spaces as they measured existential alienation against the economic disfranchisement. Often, as in Charles Willeford’s fiction, such texts adopt a form of literary blackface to articulate discontent with the emerging post-war social order.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".