Explain how television programs in the 1950s reflected middle class value.

Bender’s reference to the 1950s as a conservative age in this context evokes a decade half a century earlier in which no one asked too many questions of the government. Although the deeply ingrained decep- tion that Moore was keen to expose is in part the legacy of conspiracy theories that emerged following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the ideological warfare that Fahrenheit 9/11 documents, between ‘freedom-loving Americans’ (to use Bush’s phrase) and hateful Middle East terrorists, is the direct legacy of the early cold war years, with the target now projected onto a different enemy. The fear that the Soviet Union had the capability and the inclination to launch attacks on the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s led not only to the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs in the West, but also to the fear that communists were working to disintegrate American society from within. That physicist Klaus Fuchs and State Department official Alger Hiss were routed out of government circles for being Soviet spies (Hiss was exposed in the famous trial of 1949, Fuchs in 1950) and that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 on conspiracy charges (without full substantiation) are indi- cations of the political paranoia that grew steadily after 1946. The looming presence of the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous list of fifty-seven ‘card-carrying Communists’ that he claimed in February 1950 to be working within the Department of State (a number scaled down two days before from 205) inflamed the anticommunist hysteria that burnt strongly for eight years.