The subtitle of Dudziak’s book is “Race and the Image of American Democracy” [emphasis added]. Why is the book’s subtitle not simple “Race and American Democracy,” or perhaps “Race and the Substance of American Democracy,” instead?
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Dudziak’s focus is on the interaction between American domestic policy and international relations, and of course the fields are similar in that they involve appealing to constituencies or to foreign powers in order to improve personal and national standing. Image cultivation will always play a role there, but the importance of image is more specifically tied to the Cold War simply because the most important goal of foreign policy became preventing the spread of communism. Both within and beyond American borders, the goal of suppressing communist movements and quieting any voices that could be seen as proponents of communism took on a life of its own, and any criticism of US policy for any reason became either a communist subversion or a legitimate flaw in American democracy’s supposed superiority. So as foreign objection to American treatment of African Americans in particular and people of color in general became more vocal, even Americans who were not much affected directly by the civil rights debate, as long as they were anti-Communist, grew to see civil rights at the least as a problem in the foreign perception of America and thus as a point for communists to curry favor. People of color fighting for civil rights took up the rhetoric, and used that image problem as their argument to win over those still on the fence. For at least some white Americans, then, civil rights was not an issue on which they had a personal belief so much as an issue they took a stance on out of a desire to protect the US’s image abroad.