This project examines the role values played in early US Cold War discourse, focusing on the use and function of the morpheme free in President Truman’s and President Eisenhower’s State of the Union addresses. I examine the occurrence of free relative to similar values and demonstrate that both presidents privileged free in conceptualizing the conflict and justifying policies. I also analyze the forms through which free manifested and consider the constitutive role they played in shaping the Cold War environment. I argue that by placing free at the heart of the conflict—as the target of the Soviet “threat”—both presidents construed the geopolitical environment in a way that rendered the Cold War as inevitable and as necessarily geographically and temporally expansive. This project contributes to our understanding of the role a rhetoric of values played in Cold War discourse and the material implications of what is often deemed “mere rhetoric.”
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