From the end of World War II until the first Soviet atomic test in August 1949, the United States was the world’s foremost military, political, and financial power. After the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on each Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in August 1945, America demonstrated its unbelievable industrial might and capacity for total war, winning a global conflict on two fronts. The United States could now unleash destruction that, up to this point in history, had only been imagined in the minds of geniuses like Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
With all this power on the world stage, domestically, the United States was far from a utopia, especially for its oppressed and under-represented citizens. Jim Crow laws were still in effect in the south, homosexuality was illegal, and there existed serious discrimination towards others in non-Protestant religious sects, particularly Jewish Americans.
Elia Kazan’s 1947 Best Picture…
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