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Democratic Empire
Also by Jim Cullen
The Civil War in Popular Culture A Reusable Past (1995)
The Art of Democracy A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996)
Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997)
Popular Culture in American History (2001 Editor)
Restless in the Promised Land Catholics and the American Dream (2001)
The American Dream A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003)
The Fieldston Guide to American History for Cynical Beginners Impractical Lessons for Everyday Life (2005)
The Civil War Era An Anthology of Sources (2005 Editor with Lyde Cullen Sizer)
Imperfect Presidents Tales of Misadventure and Triumph (2007)
Essaying the Past How to Read Write and Think About History (2009)
Sensing the Past Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (2013)
A Short History of the Modern Media (2014)
Democratic EmpireThe United States Since 1945
Jim Cullen
This edition first published 2017copy 2017 Jim Cullen
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley amp Sons Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street Malden MA 02148‐5020 USA9600 Garsington Road Oxford OX4 2DQ UKThe Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
For details of our global editorial offices for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at wwwwileycomwiley‐blackwell
The right of Jim Cullen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise except as permitted by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 without the prior permission of the publisher
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names Cullen Jim 1962ndash authorTitle Democratic empire the United States since 1945 Jim CullenDescription Chichester UK Malden MA John Wiley amp Sons 2016 |
Includes bibliographical references and indexIdentifiers LCCN 2015043946 (print) | LCCN 2015049973 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781119027355 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119027348 (pbk) | ISBN 9781119027461 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119027362 (epub)
Subjects LCSH United StatesndashHistoryndash1945ndash | United StatesndashSocial conditionsndash1945ndash | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1945ndash1989 | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1989ndash
Classification LCC E741 C84 2016 (print) | LCC E741 (ebook) | DDC 97392ndashdc23LC record available at httplccnlocgov2015043946
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image copy GraphicaArtisCorbis
Set in 1012pt Galliard by SPi Global Pondicherry India
1 2017
For William NormanWho hears and makes the life of American music
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Democratic Empire
Also by Jim Cullen
The Civil War in Popular Culture A Reusable Past (1995)
The Art of Democracy A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996)
Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997)
Popular Culture in American History (2001 Editor)
Restless in the Promised Land Catholics and the American Dream (2001)
The American Dream A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003)
The Fieldston Guide to American History for Cynical Beginners Impractical Lessons for Everyday Life (2005)
The Civil War Era An Anthology of Sources (2005 Editor with Lyde Cullen Sizer)
Imperfect Presidents Tales of Misadventure and Triumph (2007)
Essaying the Past How to Read Write and Think About History (2009)
Sensing the Past Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (2013)
A Short History of the Modern Media (2014)
Democratic EmpireThe United States Since 1945
Jim Cullen
This edition first published 2017copy 2017 Jim Cullen
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley amp Sons Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street Malden MA 02148‐5020 USA9600 Garsington Road Oxford OX4 2DQ UKThe Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
For details of our global editorial offices for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at wwwwileycomwiley‐blackwell
The right of Jim Cullen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise except as permitted by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 without the prior permission of the publisher
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names service marks trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book
Limit of LiabilityDisclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom If professional advice or other expert assistance is required the services of a competent professional should be sought
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names Cullen Jim 1962ndash authorTitle Democratic empire the United States since 1945 Jim CullenDescription Chichester UK Malden MA John Wiley amp Sons 2016 |
Includes bibliographical references and indexIdentifiers LCCN 2015043946 (print) | LCCN 2015049973 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781119027355 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119027348 (pbk) | ISBN 9781119027461 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119027362 (epub)
Subjects LCSH United StatesndashHistoryndash1945ndash | United StatesndashSocial conditionsndash1945ndash | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1945ndash1989 | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1989ndash
Classification LCC E741 C84 2016 (print) | LCC E741 (ebook) | DDC 97392ndashdc23LC record available at httplccnlocgov2015043946
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image copy GraphicaArtisCorbis
Set in 1012pt Galliard by SPi Global Pondicherry India
1 2017
For William NormanWho hears and makes the life of American music
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Also by Jim Cullen
The Civil War in Popular Culture A Reusable Past (1995)
The Art of Democracy A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996)
Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997)
Popular Culture in American History (2001 Editor)
Restless in the Promised Land Catholics and the American Dream (2001)
The American Dream A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003)
The Fieldston Guide to American History for Cynical Beginners Impractical Lessons for Everyday Life (2005)
The Civil War Era An Anthology of Sources (2005 Editor with Lyde Cullen Sizer)
Imperfect Presidents Tales of Misadventure and Triumph (2007)
Essaying the Past How to Read Write and Think About History (2009)
Sensing the Past Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (2013)
A Short History of the Modern Media (2014)
Democratic EmpireThe United States Since 1945
Jim Cullen
This edition first published 2017copy 2017 Jim Cullen
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley amp Sons Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street Malden MA 02148‐5020 USA9600 Garsington Road Oxford OX4 2DQ UKThe Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
For details of our global editorial offices for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at wwwwileycomwiley‐blackwell
The right of Jim Cullen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise except as permitted by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 without the prior permission of the publisher
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names service marks trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book
Limit of LiabilityDisclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom If professional advice or other expert assistance is required the services of a competent professional should be sought
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names Cullen Jim 1962ndash authorTitle Democratic empire the United States since 1945 Jim CullenDescription Chichester UK Malden MA John Wiley amp Sons 2016 |
Includes bibliographical references and indexIdentifiers LCCN 2015043946 (print) | LCCN 2015049973 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781119027355 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119027348 (pbk) | ISBN 9781119027461 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119027362 (epub)
Subjects LCSH United StatesndashHistoryndash1945ndash | United StatesndashSocial conditionsndash1945ndash | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1945ndash1989 | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1989ndash
Classification LCC E741 C84 2016 (print) | LCC E741 (ebook) | DDC 97392ndashdc23LC record available at httplccnlocgov2015043946
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image copy GraphicaArtisCorbis
Set in 1012pt Galliard by SPi Global Pondicherry India
1 2017
For William NormanWho hears and makes the life of American music
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Democratic EmpireThe United States Since 1945
Jim Cullen
This edition first published 2017copy 2017 Jim Cullen
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley amp Sons Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street Malden MA 02148‐5020 USA9600 Garsington Road Oxford OX4 2DQ UKThe Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
For details of our global editorial offices for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at wwwwileycomwiley‐blackwell
The right of Jim Cullen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise except as permitted by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 without the prior permission of the publisher
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names service marks trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book
Limit of LiabilityDisclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom If professional advice or other expert assistance is required the services of a competent professional should be sought
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names Cullen Jim 1962ndash authorTitle Democratic empire the United States since 1945 Jim CullenDescription Chichester UK Malden MA John Wiley amp Sons 2016 |
Includes bibliographical references and indexIdentifiers LCCN 2015043946 (print) | LCCN 2015049973 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781119027355 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119027348 (pbk) | ISBN 9781119027461 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119027362 (epub)
Subjects LCSH United StatesndashHistoryndash1945ndash | United StatesndashSocial conditionsndash1945ndash | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1945ndash1989 | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1989ndash
Classification LCC E741 C84 2016 (print) | LCC E741 (ebook) | DDC 97392ndashdc23LC record available at httplccnlocgov2015043946
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image copy GraphicaArtisCorbis
Set in 1012pt Galliard by SPi Global Pondicherry India
1 2017
For William NormanWho hears and makes the life of American music
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
This edition first published 2017copy 2017 Jim Cullen
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley amp Sons Ltd The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
Editorial Offices350 Main Street Malden MA 02148‐5020 USA9600 Garsington Road Oxford OX4 2DQ UKThe Atrium Southern Gate Chichester West Sussex PO19 8SQ UK
For details of our global editorial offices for customer services and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at wwwwileycomwiley‐blackwell
The right of Jim Cullen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic mechanical photocopying recording or otherwise except as permitted by the UK Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 without the prior permission of the publisher
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names service marks trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book
Limit of LiabilityDisclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom If professional advice or other expert assistance is required the services of a competent professional should be sought
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names Cullen Jim 1962ndash authorTitle Democratic empire the United States since 1945 Jim CullenDescription Chichester UK Malden MA John Wiley amp Sons 2016 |
Includes bibliographical references and indexIdentifiers LCCN 2015043946 (print) | LCCN 2015049973 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781119027355 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119027348 (pbk) | ISBN 9781119027461 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119027362 (epub)
Subjects LCSH United StatesndashHistoryndash1945ndash | United StatesndashSocial conditionsndash1945ndash | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1945ndash1989 | United StatesndashPolitics and governmentndash1989ndash
Classification LCC E741 C84 2016 (print) | LCC E741 (ebook) | DDC 97392ndashdc23LC record available at httplccnlocgov2015043946
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover image copy GraphicaArtisCorbis
Set in 1012pt Galliard by SPi Global Pondicherry India
1 2017
For William NormanWho hears and makes the life of American music
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
For William NormanWho hears and makes the life of American music
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Contents
Acknowledgments xiPrelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream xiii
Part I The Postwar Decades 1
1 Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962 3Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism 4Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan 5First Frost Dawn of the Cold War 9Seeing Red The Cold War at Home 12Playing with Dominoes Cold War Hot Spots 17Cold War Showdown Cuba 19culture watch The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (19551956) 23
2 Conformity and Rebellion American Culture and Politics 1945ndash1963 27Best Worst Time Early Postwar Years 28Boom The Postwar Economy Explodes 29Rising Suburbs Life on the Crabgrass Frontier 32Restless in the Promised Land Suburbiarsquos Critics 35Free Movement Early Civil Rights Struggles 40Big Bangs 1950s Youth Culture 45culture watch A Raisin in the Sun (1959) 49
Part II The Long 1960s 53
3 Confidence and Agitation The American Empire at High Tide 1960ndash1965 55Dishing The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble 56American Prince JFK 58Grand Expectations The Birth of ldquothe Sixtiesrdquo 60Overcoming The Civil Rights Movement Crests 61Voices Popular Culture of the Early 1960s 64Countercurrents Civil Rights Skeptics 65Lone Star Rising The LBJ Moment 69
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
viii Contents
Flanking Maneuver Johnson in Vietnam 73Fissures Democratic Fault Lines 75culture watch ldquoThe Times They Are A‐Changinrsquordquo (1964) 80
4 Fulfillment and Frustration An Empire in Conflict 1965ndash1974 86Over the Moon Winning the Space Race 87Imperial Quagmire The Vietnam Wars 89Down from the Mountaintop The Civil Rights Movement 93Turning Point 1968 96Right Rising The Return of Richard Nixon 99Womenrsquos Work The Feminist Movement 102Rainbows Rights Revolutions 105Grim Peace Endgame in Vietnam 108Crooked Justice The Triumph and Fall of Nixon 109culture watch Easy Rider (1969) 113
5 Experimentation and Exhaustion Political Culture of the Sixties 1965ndash1975 119The Great Divide Establishment and Counterculture 120(de)Construction Sites The Rise of Postmodernism 125System Failure The Reorganization of Hollywood 126Medium Dominant Television 128Fit Print Publishing 130Kingdom of Rebels The Reign of Rock 132culture watch ldquoChuckles the Clown Bites the Dustrdquo The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1975) 140
Interlude 144
6 Reassessment and Nostalgia The American Empire in the Age of Limits 1973ndash1980 1441973 Hinge of American History 145Apocalypse Now The New Gloom 150Depressingly Decent Ford and Carter 153Solitary Refinement The Me Decade 159Body Politics Gender and Its Discontents 163Rebellion and Revival Pop Culture of the Late Seventies 166Right Signal The Conservative Turn 168culture watch Taxi Driver (1976) 175
Part III Indian Summer 181
7 Revival and Denial The American Empire on Borrowed Time 1981ndash1991 183Right Man The Age of Reagan 184Making the Cut Reaganomics 187Breaking Ice Reagan and the Cold War 191Headwinds Second‐Term Blues 193For Godrsquos Sake Social Conservatism 196
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Contents ix
Left Ahead The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties 197Swan Song Reagan and the Soviets 20141 The (First) Bush Years 203Freely Intervening United States as Sole Superpower 207culture watch The House on Mango Street (1984) 210
8 Innovation and Nostalgia The Culture of the Eighties 1981ndash1989 215Small Transformations The Rise of the Personal Computer 216Consuming Pleasures Old Fashions New Gadgets 220Seeing Music Music Television or MTV 225Yo African American Culture and the Birth of Hip‐Hop 227Bourne in the USA Dissident Voices 231culture watch ldquoThe Messagerdquo (1982) 233
9 Prosperity and Distraction The Post‐Cold War Era 1991ndash2001 238Opposing Justice The HillndashThomas Imbroglio 239Not Black and White The Changing Colors of Race 242Thug Life Gangsta Rap 244Running Saga The O J Simpson Case 246Family Matters Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy 247Culture War The Fall of George Bush 250Comeback Kid The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton 252La Vida Loca The Roaring Nineties 258Tech Sec Toward the Internet 260Insulated Intervention US Foreign Policy 264Recount The 2000 Election 267culture watch Exile in Guyville (1993) 271
Part IV Present Tense 277
10 Comfort and Dread The American Empire in Decline 2001ndashpresent 279Towering Collapse 911 280Unknown Unknowns The Iraq War 285Spending Resources The Debt Society 290Bushed Second‐Term Blues 291Downloading Twenty‐first Century Pop Culture 294Posting Web 20 298Freely Unequal The Tottering US Economy 299Audacious Hopes The Rise of Barack Obama 303Future History The Present as Past 310culture watch ldquoMade in Americardquo The Sopranos (2007) 311
Postlude The Ends of the American Century 316
Index 318
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
ldquoWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isnrsquot big enough for all that wanting I donrsquot knowrdquo
mdashHenry ldquoRabbitrdquo Angstrom protagonist of John Updikersquos Rabbit Redux 1971
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Acknowledgments
The textbook is a specific genre of historical writingmdashitrsquos a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship for example and itrsquos one intended more for the needs of the diploma‐minded student than the pleasure‐minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain) Writing a textshybook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs therersquos stuff you know you have to do stuff people are hoping to get and itrsquos your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reintershypreting songs that are already out there The accent in this book as my musical analogy suggests is a cultural one But whatever the subfield in questionmdashpolitical history social history womenrsquos historymdashmy first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history Bill McLoughlin Jim Patterson Jack Thomas and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle who accepted me into Brownrsquos American Civilization doctoral program Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment
Irsquod also like to thank my longtime editor Peter Coveney who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considershyably more ambitious This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that Irsquove produced in the Wiley publishing stable this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee project editor Julia Kirk copy editor Aravind Kannankara and proshyduction editor Vimali Joseph Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani
This book was finished during a stay as a ldquoThinker in Residencerdquo at Deakin University with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria Australia in the summer (well actually in the Australian winter) of 2015 My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton who organized the trip her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University and the staff faculty and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years and Irsquom grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there Of particular note
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
xii Acknowledgments
has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact‐checking to providing excellent interpretative advice The dedication of this volume to him is a necesshysarily insufficient gesture of gratitude
A word in memoriam I lost my beloved friend of 33 years Gordon Sterling while writing this book He embodied what was best in our national life optishymism decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind
Lyde Jay Grayson Ryland and Nancy yoursquore with me alwaysmdasheven at Starbucks where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley New York locations I thank God for you and for Grande Coffees among other blessings
mdashJim CullenHastings‐on‐Hudson New York
January 2016
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Prelude The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE You probably donrsquot think of yourself that way for some understandable reasons So itrsquos worth considering those reasons before explaining why itrsquos helpful in terms of your pastmdashand your futuremdashto understand yourself as such
One reason you donrsquot think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live You are an American more specifically you are a resident of the United States (ldquoAmericardquo being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile even if common usage suggests otherwise) and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy In fact thatrsquos not true A democracy is a society in which all citizensmdasha term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of proshyperty voting and other privilegesmdashhave a say in making government decisions The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens Of course the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves women or mere residents none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small Given the restricted number of people involved Athenian democracy was a practical possibility citizens could literally make their voices heard
The United States by contrast is a republic a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizensmdashmore precisely a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children for examplemdashwho then make laws that apply collectively The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens even if it was still relatively small (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution) In the centuries that followed the proportion of citizens grew steadily and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story) Not only was that untrue but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights as even a cursory look at womenrsquos history immigration history or that of US race relations makes clear
And yet for all this the United States continues to be commonly described by natives and observers alike as a democracy While this is not factually true it
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
xiv Prelude
does make sense in cultural terms if not in political or social ones Whether as a matter of folkways foodways or the popular media the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center It is one of the great ironies of American history for example that the period covered in this book a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence was decishysively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people American slaves Thatrsquos why therersquos some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always or even often in reality
In any case the terms ldquodemocracyrdquo or ldquorepublicrdquo are hardly synonymous with ldquoempirerdquo In popular imagination empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents Therersquos some truth to that though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural if not legal constraints than is sometimes supposed But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a milishytarily aggressive republic long before he came along
Perhaps by this point yoursquore wondering just what I mean by the word ldquoempirerdquo Irsquoll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source the Merriam‐Webster dictionary
1 a (1) a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority especially one having an emperor as chief of state (2) the territory of such a political unitb something resembling a political empire especially an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control
By any historical global standard the continental United States stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans is a ldquomajor political unit having a territory of great extentrdquo That ldquounitrdquo is also under a ldquosingle sovshyereign authorityrdquo which happens to be the US Constitution The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries as Native American peoples were expelled displaced or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans particularly those from the British Isles Even before that process was complete the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases which now circle the globe Americans do not have an emperor but they do have a president who wields considerable powermdashand in the realm of foreign affairs that power now verges on unilateral And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution the US governshyment nevertheless exercises considerable economic andor military power far beyond its territorial boundaries Empires have always exercised power over so‐called client states which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Prelude xv
By way of illustration consider the different‐but‐related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union) the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century even though Cuba was never part of the United States and indeed despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century) and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties) All these and others have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire
Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue you havenrsquot been brought up to think of ldquoempirerdquo as a nice word You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad even at home and have done so for some time But insofar as you think such people have a point yoursquore likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary an exceptionalmdashor perhaps most oftenmdasha regrettable situation not really reflecting US principles The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others for that matter) This is to say that the United States is hypocritical violating the terms of its own creation in which ideals such as ldquoall men are created equalrdquo and ldquolife liberty and the pursuit of happinessrdquo are considered sacredmdashmore sacred at this point than the Christian faith that underwrote them Americans think of themselves as exceptional these critics say In fact theyrsquore just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue
These critics are correct The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government its rapid territorial acquisition its global influence or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous That said while empires aremdashby definitionmdashaggressive and self‐serving in the ways they amass power they have their uses even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them Empires impose order and while order can be tyrannical it can also be convenient and necessary too for many forms of a desirable life whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility the movement of goods across borders the protection of minority rights or the creation of durable works of art
The other point to be made heremdashand one thatrsquos most relevant to the matter at handmdashis that while empires may not be unique in their behavior they tend to have distinctive accents Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force and force that is always applied internally as well as externally But the success of empires whether defined in terms of size longevity or influence always rests on other factorsmdashsometimes itrsquos a culture the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans) other times itrsquos religion as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries yet other times itrsquos a personality such as Alexander the Great though these tend not to last long Very often of course successful empires exhibit all these features among others
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
xvi Prelude
But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power There is always concentration at the top As a practical matter however power must be divided somewhat whether geographically (such as among states) among heirs in a political dynasty literally or figuratively (wersquove had both in the United States from the Adams family through the Bush family) or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution) Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies
Depending on their circumstances or values there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have and a lot of that in turn will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors The typical engine of empires is conquest an army as an investment of time money and life marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods
That said the long‐term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widelymdashnot universally mind you but relatively so Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work though itrsquos hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time In general providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race class or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop Over time the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow So it is for example that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire The Roman Dream as it were
Which brings us to the case of the United States As Irsquove said the United States is not unique in any of the terms Irsquove been discussing But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire Simply put there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much
Before going any further I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance First of all saying so many people have so much doesnrsquot mean everyshybody has enough Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life And even those who have ldquoenoughrdquo defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on however empty shelter to speak of however dangerous sources of comshyfort or pleasure however limited or self‐destructive) does not mean that many or even most Americans live what most would call a decent life
If yoursquore reading this book the chances are that you do have a decent life But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence even if they happen to be comfortable Therersquos something a little comical about such a description similar to the once‐proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa Insofar as itrsquos true itrsquos also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa)
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Prelude xvii
But Irsquom here to tell you that in some important sense considering yourself a child of empire is accurate and it is relevant From the very beginning of the colonial era the settlers of what became the United States were in the words of the title of a classic work of history a people of plenty ldquoTake foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together they may in no way comshypare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soilerdquo the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia Thomas Dale said not entirely exaggerating in 16111 Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge2 The reality of relative plenty continued into the twenshytieth century In 1948 the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars3 Televisions cellphones Internet connecshytions even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations
One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosshyperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years The conditions Irsquom describing were as much the result of a series of pre‐existing conditionsmdashmoderate climate good soil a bounty of natural resources relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated landmdashthan any human design When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal and that they were entitled to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness he did not present these notions as aspirations Instead he presented them as facts as ldquoself‐evidentrdquo truths conferred by what he called ldquoNaturersquos Godrdquo To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nationrsquos foundersmdashand there certainly was somemdashthe relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightshyened self‐interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified To cite perhaps the most important example the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding
Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well Note howshyever that ldquoplausiblerdquo does not mean ldquocertainrdquo or even ldquolikelyrdquo Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say with at least as much credibility that the reality of life liberty and happiness are far from self‐evidentmdashand that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life Actually many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
xviii Prelude
few centuries Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experishyence or observation
But the key pointmdashactually itrsquos the premise on which this book restsmdashis that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776 In a sense this is whatrsquos self‐evident for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable) the Union would not have survived Amid some widely expressed doubts and amid well‐founded suspicions that the nationrsquos abundance was being squandered unfairly distributed or simply evapshyorating a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted It was always a matter of how not if they could be realized4
In modern times wersquove given a name to these promises placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the takingmdashthe reality of abundance the real possibility of gaining augmenting or redistributing it and the sense of satisfacshytion that would follow from its flow
Itrsquos significant that the term ldquoAmerican Dreamrdquo first entered common parshylance during the Great Depression because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal as the nationrsquos collective confidence was shaken to its core But as many studies of the decade have attested the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream There are two basic reasons for this The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and sucshycessfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded The other is that the most obvious alternatives to itmdashrepresented on the Left by Stalinrsquos Soviet Union and the Right by Hitlerrsquos Germanymdashwere decidedly less appealing Actually these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s which bolstered the nationrsquos capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and in the process stimulated the economy even more effecshytively than Rooseveltrsquos New Deal did A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis
It was a third rival imperial Japan who finally provoked a cautious even skeptical United States into World War II A generation earlier the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war Despite such success the
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Prelude xix
United States unlike Japan reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941 the results were from an imperial standpoint spectacularly successful The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior milishytary talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extendshying lifelines to its British Soviet and Chinese allies in the process) When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945 the United States was unquestionably the worldrsquos greatest military and economic power even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it
World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever Again the realities of national life were in a great many cases different And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied That potency was powerful in what it could achieve it was dangerous in what it could upend it was risky in the disappointment it could engender But neither friend nor foe could anticipate much less control the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide
This is the point where our story begins In the three‐quarters of a century since World War II US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic That power affected people in different ways and generated different outcomes It was sometimes channeled in specific direcshytions in others it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor) and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that genshyerated friction (a source of electricity in its own right) In a very important sense the perception of power was often more significant than the reality What people believed was possible what they feared and what they hoped are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II
This book will look at those perceptions fears and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP) technologshyical innovations (here Irsquoll note that virtually all modern electronics from comshyputers through cell phones run on alternating current) and sociological changes (eg the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates) However that elusive but pervasive thing we call culturemdashdiscussed here primarily in terms of the mass media the fine arts and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circlesmdashwill be central to what the book purports to chronicle which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood
This story is perhaps inevitably one of declension the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak That was bound to change in part because shrewd US politicians understood
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
xx Prelude
that rebuilding former enemies was good policy But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable if dimly understood rhythm of history at work Empires rise and fall Thatrsquos certain And yet their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect In any case individual lives always unfold someshywhat independently of national fates Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits Thatrsquos why trying to understand that context makes some sense and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in onersquos life We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures This hope may be an illusion but itrsquos a sustaining one and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized In any case a desire to dream your own destinymdashand more crucially the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shoresmdashis nothing if not characteristically American
Notes
1 Dale quoted in David Potter People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the American Character (1956 Chicago University of Chicago Press) 78
2 The relative mildness of slavery in North America compared to elsewhere in the hemisphere has been widely discussed For an overview see Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619ndash1877 revised edition (1993 New York Hill amp Wang 2003) esp 133ndash168 Ch 4
3 Jim Cullen The American Dream A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York Oxford University Press 2003) 150
4 Garry Wills makes this point in Nixon Agonistes The Crisis of the Self‐Made Man (1970 New York Houghton Mifflin 2002) 453
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Part I
The Postwar Decades
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Democratic Empire The United States Since 1945 First Edition Jim Cullencopy 2017 Jim Cullen Published 2017 by John Wiley amp Sons Inc
1
Victory and Anxiety World War and Cold War 1945ndash1962
Figure 11 CHE BELLO Residents of New York Cityrsquos Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945 The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come (Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington DC 20540 USA httphdllocgovlocpnpcph3c35620)
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
4 Democratic Empire
Colony to Colonizer American Rise to Globalism
Awesome
In recent decades the word has been a slang expression of approval ldquoThat was an awesome gamerdquo ldquoThose are awesome shoesrdquo ldquoShersquos really an awesome personrdquo1 Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning that which inspires amazement even fear in its overwhelming power ldquoAwerdquo generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments or the earth‐shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them Earthly phenomena can be awesome too A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience So is the miracle of birth
Herersquos something else thatrsquos awesome US military power With bases that circle the globe soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world and cutting‐edge technology that is continually updated the president of the United States can at a momentrsquos notice wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone And that doesnrsquot even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is ldquoasymmetrical warfarerdquo) something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam Afghanistan and New Yorkrsquos World Trade Center among other places in the last 75 years But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal
This awesome capacity which has been used for good as well as evil has been a fact of global life since World War II Actually in relative terms English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the sevenshyteenth century New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644 and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776 and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with French Spanish and Dutch help) For most of the nineteenth century US security was guaranteed by the British Navy which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (thatrsquos because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out) Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples Even when the United States was wracked by a
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Victory and Anxiety 5
fierce Civil War England and France though tempted thought better of intershyvening to bolster their respective positions in North America When the Civil War ended the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth Foreign govshyernments sent military experts to observe that war closely they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare
After 1865 the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance Herersquos a paradox for a nation of its size the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies When the United States finally did collide with a European powermdashSpain in 1898mdashit won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines By the time of the outshybreak of World War I in 1914 the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second‐tier power behind Britain and Germany
Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics the American peoshyple reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention notwithshystanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage After hesitating early in the war Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France American public opinion changed dramatically and the United States went to war in 1917 The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last‐chance German offensive against Paris Though plausible that bet was a losing one American troops arrived in force in 1918 re‐energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months Once again the nation benefited from the weakness of others this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership But the deep grooves of public opinion suspicious of what this might entail rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented and Congress voted accordingly The nation turned inward again in large measure because it could afford to for another generation
Wages of War Triumph over Germany and Japan
World War II proved to be a turning point in the nationrsquos relationship with the world At first it didnrsquot seem it would be Over the course of the 1930s volatile European powersmdashthe Germans now under Nazi rule the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empiresmdashlurched toward disaster Meanwhile in the Pacific the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests many of them petroleum‐based
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
6 Democratic Empire
in Southeast Asia None of this was enough to budge American public opinion which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s designed to handcuff the desire of internationalistsmdashnotably President Franklin Delano Rooseveltmdashfrom acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States
Yet by 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe even the most committed of the so‐called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses In the first 2 years of the new decade the US government stepped up building up its military capacitymdashreinstituting the draft for examplemdashand spending money on weapons It certainly helped that rearmashyment also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s With some difficulty President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend‐Leasemdashmilitary aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval basesmdashbecause it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting Meanwhile more high‐minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming ldquoAmerican Centuryrdquo2
The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific There is of course much to be said about this For our purposes whatrsquos notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously but the way it prevailed by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheermdashyes awesomemdashpower That power rested on a number of foundations One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war)3 Another was the size and competence of its armed forces mobilized from a wide cross‐section of society that was notably well‐fed literate and confident
The most decisive aspect of US power however was an economic base that staggered its opponents Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union an ally it turned on in 1941 the finest the world has ever seen) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself but its allies with whatever it took to win By 1943 most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war‐making
Numbers alone tell a vivid story For example the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor where hundreds of
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
Victory and Anxiety 7
aircraft were damaged in a single day And yet within months American conshytractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack which had been planned for many years4 A Liberty ship used to carry cargo took 355 days to build in 1941 Within a year production time was cut to 56 days and in one case a mere 2 weeks (The construction quality was not as good but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production such as tanks5) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots 5 million tons of food 2000 locomotives 11000 freight carriages and 540000 tons of railsmdashmore than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939mdashthat Americans provided among other supplies in 4 years of Lend‐Lease to say nothing of what it provided to Britain China and other allies In 1939 the United States was a negligible factor in the international arms market by 1944 it was producing 40 of the worldrsquos weapons And by 1947 the nation was producing almost half of the manufactured goods in the world6
War sometimes destroys economies In the case of the United States however World War II proved wondrous with a glow that lasted decades Stanford University historian David Kennedy has aptly summarized its transformative power
At the end of the Depression decade [1939] nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families still lived in poverty One in seven workers remained unemployed By warrsquos end unemployment was negligible In the ensushying quarter century the American economy would create some 20 million new jobs more than half of them filled by women Within less than a generation of the warrsquos end the middle class defined as families with annual incomes between three and ten thousand dollars more than doubled By 1960 the middle class included almost two‐thirds of all Americans most of whom owned their own homes unprecedented achievements for any modern society7
This is not to say that World War II can account for all of this or that it had a positive economic outcome for everyone or that its rewards were evenly distrishybuted Prosperity may have alleviated evils such as racism for example but it hardly eradicated them in a society where discrimination had always been a fact of life and would remain a fact of life During the war millions of African Americans left the rural segregated South to find jobs in Northern cities They found those jobsmdashand they found ongoing segregation sometimes repressive enough to spark violence in cities such as Detroit and St Louis which experienced bloody race riots Perhaps even more than the actual opportunities generated by the war it was the rising sense of expectations that marked the war years in domestic life
Indeed it was precisely this sense of hope that led African Americans and other minorities to fight not only to defeat Hitler and the nightmarish vision he represented but also to resist Hitlers at home Foreigners also understood the
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
8 Democratic Empire
appeal of the American way of life and that its realization was directly correlated with onersquos proximity to America itself Itrsquos no wonder that defeated German soldiers vastly preferred to surrender to Americans than the Soviets not only as a matter of survival prospects but also as a matter of what life was likely to be like after the war Nowhere was the coming economic divide more obvious than in territories partitioned between the two major powers at the end of the conflict The comparison between a Soviet‐dominated East Germany and US‐dominated West Germany or a Soviet‐controlled North Korea and a US‐ controlled South Korea proved to be object lessons in what communism and capitalism had to offer It was no contest
American international economic dominance was codified at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 It was at this gathering of 44 allied nations in a New Hampshire hotel that the parameters of a United Statesndashcentric global economic order was established one that included the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The dollar in effect became the international currency replacing the British pound sterling While the world economy has changed substantially since that time and the relative position of the United States has slipped signifshyicantly world markets still play by these American‐made rules
But the greatest demonstration of American might in World War II was techshynological It was a single act performed on August 6 1945 the dropping of the atomic bomb If this was not awesome nothing on earth ever was While some critics argued it was too terrible a weapon to be deployed even against a hated enemy there was relatively little domestic opposition to its use at Hiroshima and when surrender was not immediately forthcoming at Nagasaki 3 days later Military planners were acutely aware that less than 5 of Japanese soldiers had ever surrendered in battle and that the planned invasion of Japan would involve millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of casualties Though his decision was criticized at the time and ever sincemdashalmost 100000 people died instantly at HiroshimamdashPresident Harry Truman who took office upon the death of Roosevelt that spring never doubted his responsibility to end the war as quickly and decisively as he could8
The atomic bomb was only the most visible and terrifying manifestation of US technological might during and following World War II But it was during the latter part of the war that the American government began developing another technology that would also have a dramatic impact on the shape of the postwar world computers To a significant degree the US innovation in this field was related to policy surrounding the bomb9
For most of US history the word ldquocomputersrdquo did not refer to things they referred to people many of them women who did the math of everyday commercial lifemdashmanaging payrolls budgets and the like They were assisted by a series of tools such as the slide rule commonplace before the invention of calshyculators The 1924 creation of International Business Machines (IBM) under the leadership of executive Thomas J Watson became one of the greatest success stories of corporate capitalism Over the course of the next generation IBM led
