How does this book represent the cold war stuggle between the Bear (USSR) and the Eagle (USA)? What is the Moral of the Story?
DR. SEUSS, The Butter Battle Book tells the story of a cold war dispute between two peoples, the Yooks and the Zooks. The essence of the dispute is the question which side bread should be buttered on, with the Yooks buttering the top side and the Zooks the bottom.
The collapse of Nazi Germany and the need to fill the resulting power vacuum led to the disintegration of the wartime partnership; the purposes of the Allies were simply too divergent: Churchill sought to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Central Europe; Stalin wanted to be paid in territorial coin for Soviet military victories and the heroic suffering of the Russian people; the new President of the U.S., Harry S. Truman, intially strove to continue Roosevelt’s legacy of holding the alliance together. However, every vestige of wartime harmony had vanished. The Soviet Union and the United States, the two giants at the periphery, were now facing off against one another in the very heart of Europe. Truman was thrust into a world of contemporary diplomacy and the age of the atom bomb, when previously he only had to manage the Senate, and as Roosevelt’s understudy, he had a limited projection on the grave matters at hand: his call of duty went so far as to provide him the opportunity to take the then-President’s place should he become incapitated, incarcerated, etc. As was the case with Roosevelt’s deteriorating health, there was a necessity for him to relinquish his position of authority and place the “magic stick”, as it were, in the hands of his subordinate and soon to be successor. Truman’s three month tenure as Vice-President served little to inform him of the true state of policy and grounds for making decisions proactive to national security, muchless on a global scale. He would come to find that the gravity of tensions already instilled in nations with opposing political ideologies were much more grandiose than credited by special terms coined by political analysts and cabinet advisors, like containment, Four Policemen, collective security, etc. Therein, Truman inherited an international environment whose dividing lines were inchoately based on the position of armies advancing from east and west. The political fate of the countries liberated by Allied armies had not yet been resolved. Most of the traditional Great Powers still had to adjust to their changed roles. France was prostrate; Great Britain, though victorious, was exhausted; Germany was being carved into four occupation zones–having haunted Europe with its strength since 1871, its impotence now threatened it with chaos. Stalin’s wishes were to extend the Soviet frontier, while keeping a tight grip on Germany and thereby taking advantage of the creation of the vacuum that proposed the weakness of Western Europe. (TBC)
