Read Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 Online
Authors: James T. Patterson
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Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974
Grand Expectations
The Oxford History of the United States
C. Vann Woodward,
General Editor
Volume III
ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF
THE GLORIOUS CAUSE
The American Revolution, 1763–1789
Volume VI
JAMES MCPHERSON
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
The Civil War Era
Volume X
JAMES T. PATTERSON
GRAND EXPECTATIONS
The United States, 1945–1974
GRAND EXPECTATIONS
The United States, 1945–1974
JAMES T. PATTERSON
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1997
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, James T.
Grand expectations : the United States, 1945–1974 /
James T. Patterson.
p. cm.—(Oxford history of the United States; v. 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-10-507680-X
ISBN 0-19-511797-2 (Pbk.)
1. United States—History—1945- I. Title. II. Series.
E173.094 vol. 10 [E741] 973.92—dc20 95–13878
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7 8 9 10
Printed in the United States of America
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To Cynthia, with love
Preface
My title,
Grand Expectations
, tries to capture the main theme of this book, that the majority of the American people during the twenty-five or so years following the end of World War II developed ever-greater expectations about the capacity of the United States to create a better world abroad and a happier society at home. This optimism was not altogether new: most Americans, living in a land of opportunity, have always had great hopes for the future. But high expectations, rooted in vibrant economic growth, ascended as never before in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s, an extraordinarily turbulent decade during which faith in the wealth of the United States—and in the capacity of the federal government to promote progress—aroused unprecedented rights-consciousness on the home front. America's political leaders, meanwhile, managed to stimulate enormous expectations about the nation's ability to direct world affairs. More than ever before—or since—Americans came to believe that they could shape the international scene in their own image as well as fashion a more classless, equal opportunity society.
I call this grand quest for opportunity at home a rights revolution. It affected all manner of Americans, including people who were disadvantaged—minorities, the poor, women, and many others—and who demanded greater access to the ever-richer society that was glittering around them. The quest resulted in significant and lasting improvement in the economic and legal standing of millions of people. No comparable period of United States history witnessed so much economic and civic progress. In this golden age it often seemed that there were no limits to what the United States could do both at home and abroad.
1
Throughout these years, however, the revolution in expectations confronted stubborn forces that blocked the most grandiose of personal dreams. There were limits after all. In the postwar era, as before, social cleavages beset the United States, one of the world's vastest and most heterogeneous nations. Racial conflicts in particular polarized American life. Other long-standing divisions—of gender, region, religion, ethnicity, and class—grew increasingly glaring, especially in the 1960s. And frightening international tensions, anchored in a Cold War, lasted throughout the postwar years. These tensions inspired some creative statecraft, but they also nourished extremes, such as McCarthyism, and they provoked terrible blunders, notably vast escalation of war in Vietnam. Both the internal divisions and the blunders aroused dissension and enlarged the gap between what people expected and what they managed to accomplish.
Many of the grand expectations survived the turbulent 1960s; activists for environmental protection and women's rights, for instance, achieved considerable visibility in the early 1970s. Also surviving, however, were strongly held traditional ideas: faith in the virtue of hard work, belief in self-help and individualism, conservative religious values. Popular doubts intensified about the postwar rise of large, centralized government. The rights revolution, moreover, helped to stir backlash from people who resented what they considered to be the demands of groups for special privileges. And the Vietnam War widened a "credibility gap" between what America's leaders said they were doing and what in fact they were doing. This gap, already profound by 1968, grew enormous when President Richard Nixon tried to cover up the involvement of his aides in the scandal of Watergate. These events deepened a popular distrust of government—and of elites in general—that in varying forms has lasted to our own times.
The economy, a driving force behind the rise of expectations from 1945 to the late 1960s, also developed worrisome problems by the early 1970s. These problems—which stymied economic growth in the mid- and late 1970s—did not destroy either the grand expectations or the rights-consciousness that had mushroomed since 1945. Demands for rights, sharply whetted during the previous decades, remained as enduring legacies of the postwar era. But popular uneasiness about the economy did more than any other development of the 1970s to dull the extraordinary optimism that had peaked in the mid-1960s. Therein lay a central feature of the more somber culture that emerged after 1974: rising tension between still grand expectations on the one hand and unyielding social divisions, traditional beliefs, and economic uncertainty on the other. From the early 1970s to our own times Americans have displayed an often rancorous disillusion. Much of the older optimism has abated. We live in a more troubled and often more contentious society.
Providence, R.I.
October
1995
Jim Patterson
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped to make this book possible. I am grateful first to the expert staff of the Brown University History Department: Camille Dickson, Cherrie Guerzon, Karen Mota, and Fran Wheaton, who handled my many requests—especially concerning printing, copying, and mailing—with efficiency and good humor. Several graduate students in the History Department served expertly as research assistants and critics of earlier drafts. They are Lucy Barber, James Sparrow, David Witwer, and Bernard Yamron, who also expertly compiled the index. Larry Small, a Brown undergraduate at the time, proved to be an outstanding research aide as a summer intern. India Cooper was a first-rate copy editor and Joellyn Ausanka provided excellent additional editorial assistance. Andrew Albanese, assistant editor of the Oxford University Press, ably took charge of many important matters, including photographs and maps, and shepherded the manuscript through its many stages of production.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded me a fellowship which enabled me to take time off from teaching and work full time at research. My thanks to the center, and especially to Michael Lacey, its Director of United States Studies, who gave me enthusiastic support and many good ideas. Brown University also provided important research assistance.
Several scholars who are authorities about aspects of postwar United States history offered discerning comments on earlier drafts of the book. They include James Giglio, George Herring, Townsend Ludington, Charles Neu, David Patterson, John Rowett, Luther Spoehr, and William Stueck. Alan Brinkley and Alonzo Hamby read large portions of the manuscript, greatly improving it in the process. I am especially grateful to my friends and fellow historians John Dittmer, Steven Gillon, and David Kennedy, each of whom read the entire manuscript, covering it with acute observations and criticisms. C. Vann Woodward, general editor of the Oxford History of the United States, and Sheldon Meyer, senior vice-president of the Press, also read every word and saved me from more blunders than I care to remember. I thank finally my wife, Cynthia, whose constant encouragement enabled me to carry the book through to completion.
J. T. P.
Contents
1. Veterans, Ethnics, Blacks, Women
2. Unions, Liberals, and the State: Stalemate
4. Grand Expectations About the World
5. Hardening of the Cold War, 1945–1948
6. Domestic Politics: Truman's First Term
7. Red Scares Abroad and at Home
14. A Center Holds, More or Less, 1957–1960
15. The Polarized Sixties: An Overview
18. Lyndon Johnson and American Liberalism
19. A Great Society and the Rise of Rights-Consciousness
21. Rights, Polarization, and Backlash, 1966–1967
22. The Most Turbulent Year: 1968
24. Nixon, Vietnam, and the World, 1969–1974
25. End of an Era? Expectations amid Watergate and Recession
Editor's Introduction
The writing of recent history surely needs no defense. A few historians may shy away from the present as venturing too close to the brink of the future, but James T. Patterson, author of this volume in
The Oxford History of the United States
, is clearly not one of them. He might, had he felt the need for it, have cited the precedent set by Thucydides, father of the profession, who wrote the history of his own times. A special need is served by the historian who addresses the recent past, since it is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology. That is particularly true of the period treated in this volume.
The three decades following the Second World War were prolific breeders of myth. The two great military victories on opposite sides of the globe, followed by unparalleled prosperity at home and world leadership abroad, bred a national euphoria, even hubris in some, capable of the boast that America could do anything: "The impossible takes a little longer." Older myths enjoyed new life—national invincibility and national innocence, for example. Americans won their wars—all of them, so they believed—and fought them all for righteous purposes. New crusades were inspired against old domestic ills and injustices. A War Against Poverty was officially declared, and campaigns were waged to assure equal rights and justice for all.
The last decade treated in
Grand Expectations
, however, proved to be crowded with shattered expectations and hopes. The country's longest and most unpopular war, one difficult to call righteous, ended not in victory but in defeat. Fear of nuclear attack in the Cold War drove citizens into bomb shelters at times. The civil rights movement broke apart, and violent mobs set cities aflame, including the capital. The plight of a black underclass became worse. A President was assassinated and so was his brother while seeking the same office. Assassination also proved the fate of the two foremost black leaders of the period, each gunned down in his prime at the age of thirty-nine. Threatened with impeachment for misconduct in the White House, a President resigned in disgrace.
A period so crowded with contradictions and complexities, so befogged with myths to glorify successes and expectations, as well as myths to justify failures and disgraces, demands talents of a high order on the part of the historian. James Patterson meets those demands with remarkable qualities of skill and courage. No myth is too sacred, no reputation so exalted as to escape his unsparing analysis and plain speaking. At the same time he is always ready to acknowledge good intentions and achievements of high order. His readers will finish this book with a new and deeper understanding of this country and its history.
A few changes in the plans originally announced for the series of volumes in
The Oxford History
should be noted. Instead of nine volumes there will be ten to cover that many periods, and there will be one volume on economic history. There is no change in the plan to publish each book as it is completed and to leave each author free of any expectation of conformity in interpretation or point of view.
C. Vann Woodward