Atomic Fatherhood: ‘Uncle Louis’, ‘Ike’ and the Electoral Politics of Paternalism in Canada and the United States, 1949–53
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Louis St Laurent and Dwight Eisenhower came to power during one of the most intense periods of the Cold War. The Soviets had recently developed a nuclear bomb, touching off an arms race, while both the Canadian and American governments ran desperate investigations to purge their ranks of suspected communist sympathisers. St Laurent's victories in 1949, and again in 1953, as well as Eisenhower's in 1952, are often seen as inevitable. This interpretation is rooted in the fact that both men managed to stir overwhelming support from the hearts of their citizens. However, this viewpoint often fails to examine how their campaigns did this – through the projection of a reassuring, paternalistic image that spoke to hegemonic masculine norms in the era. Elaine Tyler May argues that the nuclear family, with the father at the helm, was seen as a form of ‘domestic containment’ against external ills. This article extends that theory upwards and explores how voters responded positively to the projection of a fatherly image from St Laurent and Eisenhower. At the same time, it examines how their campaigns actively deployed masculine image‐making to discredit opponents and depict them as outside the hegemonic masculine ideal. By voting instead for St Laurent and Eisenhower, citizens could be reassured that their families would come under the protection of a calm father figure, who would guide the nation through the current period of intense instability.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it