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INTRODUCTION

A Canceled Exhibit

In 1995 curators at the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., attempted to install an exhibit commemo-rating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Centered on the last dramatic acts of the conflict, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the exhibit simultaneously attempted to memorialize the struggle and to integrate recently recovered historical evidence, hoping to provoke "a more profound discussion of the atomic bombings" (as exhibit planners told The New York Times). The plans alone spurred intense public discussion. Veterans' groups, peace activists, historians, journalists, and politicians debated American objectives during World War II, the merit of the Hiroshima bombing, and the causes of the Cold War, all as part of an effort to influence the Smithsonian's presentation of the exhibit. Five times the curators revised the exhibit to meet the concerns of interested parties. Finally, unable to reconcile often-conflicting perspectives, the Smithsonian canceled the exhibit. Yet the debate over the history of the 1940s continues. Two generations after the end of the war, the events of midcentury are alive in the minds of much of the American public.

Hard-Won Victory

The controversy over the Smithsonian exhibit suggests the vital importance of the 1940s to Americans of the war generation and after. For those who lived through the war, it was a period of sacrifices and struggles, of lives disrupted and lost, of total war and partial peace. For subsequent generations the 1940s were equally important; for the history of the decade includes critical lessons: the barbarism of fascism and militarism, the dehumanization of racism and the Holocaust, the thralldom of ideological dogmatism. Many refuse to forget the 1940s for fear of repeating the past; others cling to the decade as the source of identity and meaning. What we as a people believed ourselves to be before the 1940s is not what we believe ourselves to be after that decade. The Blitz, Stalingrad, Corregidor, the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, Okinawa, and Hiroshima made us aware of human cruelty and brutality on a scale scarcely imagined before the 1940s. Equally, perhaps, the war broadened the spectrum of human endurance, heroism, and bravery, but in the intellectual postmortem after the war, few celebrated wartime achievements, and the vast majority searched for a means to prevent another such war. Nothing quite like World War II has ever occurred again; yet a glance at any contemporary newspaper suffices to note how many lessons of the 1940s remained unlearned.

A World Torn Apart

The 1940s were a decade in which history dramatically transformed the lives of millions, radically altering basic suppositions about the character and possibility of life itself. The period following the war brought an explosion of monographs on religion, psychological studies of authoritarianism, and novels dissecting the war experience. Existentialism, with its demand for activism to overcome the absurdity of life, is a poignant product of the war; Reinhold Niebuhr's neoorthodox assessment of humanity's innate evil was similarly shaped by reactions to the war. While intellectuals revised basic social and political assumptions, average people grappled with the disruption of established norms caused by the war. This disruption was less notable in America than elsewhere in the world. Americans never experienced the terror of air bombardment, the loss of homes, the suspension of justice—the sheer devastation that visited Russia, China, Japan, and most of Europe. Instead, Americans emerged from the war as citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, far more prosperous than they were before it. People's ambitions, their expectations and desires, however, had been altered irrevocably. Americans spent the first five years of the decade watching the world pull their lives apart; they spent the next five years of the decade trying to put their lives back together. But nothing was ever the same.

A World Power

In the 1940s Americans became worldly. Sixteen to seventeen million Americans served in the military, the majority overseas. The rest of the nation was in nightly radio contact with London, Rome, Tokyo, Moscow, Addis Ababa, and Tehran. Postcards and letters from all over the world circulated; rationing and sacrifices on the home front in America had effects oceans away. Newsreels brought the war home to millions; Hollywood took home to the soldiers abroad. Families charted the maneuvers of generals and learned the names of places they never dreamed existed. Soldiers brought wives home from the Philippines, Germany, and Italy; families joined occupying troops in Japan, Germany, and Korea. As the 1940s began, isolationism, the belief that America was somehow disconnected from the rest of the world, was the most popular political movement in America; the decade ended with the United States signing unprecedented military alliances with foreign powers. Isolationism was irrevocably dead. America stepped on the world stage to fight a world war; Americans became citizens of the world in the process.

A National Mind

The United States became a global power, but Americans were not accustomed to thinking in global terms. Their interpretations of the world could be surprisingly simplistic and one-dimensional. Newsreels presented pictures of faraway places, but they were only images. Wartime France was not the "real" France, and the American army by necessity did not so much experience foreign cultures as roll right over them. The American military had a job to do they really did not care for; they wanted to get it done and go back home.

The Face of the Enemy

The simplistic assumptions Americans had about the world are exemplified in commonly held generalizations about the enemy. "A Jap's a" Jap," said Gen. John DeWitt, and, accepting that axiom, many Americans collapsed all distinctions between the Tokyo government and the Japanese people, the Japanese and Asians generally, and the Japanese enemy and Japanese Americans. The demands of total war fostered such propagandistic stereotypes, images of the enemy that lumped them all into a slightly dehumanized category. Humanitarian considerations were all but abandoned when carpet bombing Stuttgart, Cologne, or Dresden. For most Americans the moral issue was simple: German civilians made weapons for German soldiers who killed American boys. No one was innocent. Similarly, after the war few Americans distinguished between the communism of Joseph Stalin and that of Marshall Tito, Chairman Mao, or Ho Chi Minh, no matter how long the histories of animosity among them. Nor for that matter could many Americans distinguish communism from the postwar French socialism of Léon Blum or the British Labourism of Clement At;ee. President Harry S Truman dispensed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's subtlety and cosmopolitan assurance in foreign affairs and returned American society to a world outlook bound by cultural arrogance and simplistic aphorisms. "The only thing the Russians understand is force," he said, right after Winston Churchill announced the dawn of the Cold War in the American heartland of Fulton, Missouri. Such simplicity cost Truman dearly. Lacking a true understanding of the complexities of Chinese politics, the American people concluded that the Truman administration "lost" China when Mao Tse-tung won the Chinese civil war in 1949. Assuming Truman was soft on communism, they handed him his hat before the 1952 election even began.

The World in Fine

For all their nationalist arrogance, however, Americans did become more worldly, did begin to think more globally in the 1940s. In some ways they had no choice. The world got smaller. Aircraft routinely circumnavigated the globe by the end of the decade. The development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles meant that two oceans no longer adequately protected the United States. Foreign ideas penetrated American borders with impunity. Propaganda broadcasts from the enemy were received on the front lines and in the heartland during the war. American broadcasters carefully monitored their programs and canceled weather reports so their transmissions would be useless to an enemy listening a continent away. In the 1940s, moreover, the world came to America. In the receiving and transmitting of information, refugee scientists recognized no national boundaries. British military strategists and Latin American diplomats converged on Washington. Madame Chiang Kai-shek toured America by train. In 1944 European economists met their American counterparts in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and mapped out the structure of postwar trade. In 1945 the world sent representatives to San Francisco to establish the United Nations, which took up permanent residence in New York City. American ports shipped goods from every continent. American corporations penetrated nearly every world market. American educators rebuilt the school systems in Germany and Japan. In the 1940s America was the world.

New York

More precisely, New York City was the world. Even before the war the city had been teeming with millions from all points of the compass: Asians, South Americans, Eastern Europeans, Italians, Irish, Poles, and Russians. London, already struggling before the war to maintain its position as the world financial center, finally gave way to Wall Street. Berlin, the academic and intellectual capital of the West before the Nazis, relocated to Morningside Heights. Paris, long the artistic center of the West, shipped its talent en masse to Greenwich Village, which replaced the Left Bank as the premiere site for artistic display and sale. Paris almost lost its reputation as the world's fashion center as well; it recovered by 1950, but New York became at least its equal. Nothing demonstrated New York's primacy in science better than the fact that the American atomic bomb was conceived within the five boroughs; the massive program to develop it, of course, was named the Manhattan Project. Not only, however, did the world come to New York, but New York went to the world. The Americanization of Europe began on Broadway, on 52nd Street, in Midtown. American communications, cinema, and publishing companies, located in Manhattan, shipped the culture of the United States abroad. Bebop, swing, blues, and country music, the giants of American literature, Abstract Expressionism, modern dance, the Broadway show—even baseball and basketball—were exported through New York. Millions of soldiers and sailors passed through New York on their way to and from the war; they took the tastes and sights of cosmopolitan New York home with them. The television industry was born in New York, as was the urban superhighway, the modern American suburb, and the gray-flannel suit. The blacklist got its start in New York, as did the Beat writers of the 1950s, and the black nationalism of the 1960s. New York hammered the regional and ethnic cultures of the United States into nationally recognizable form: the South of Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams passed through New York publishing houses and production companies to the rest of America; Milton Berle and a host of New York television and publishing figures took Brooklyn Judaism to the heartland; Sinatra and New York-based record companies took the Italian American style of Hoboken and the Bronx to the nation. The crossroads of American and European culture, New York became the center of innovative hybrids of high and low culture; it was the richest and largest city in the world, the only major world center unscathed by war; a place teeming with vitality, diversity, and style.

Creative Fusions

New York and the rest of the United States in the 1940s were the laboratory for exciting, creative fusions in the arts and sciences, the birth-place of a new, cosmopolitan perspective. When the aesthetic sensibility of high European modernism met the expressive preoccupations of American democracy, the result was the creation of the world's first international culture. Abstract Expressionism, the style of modern painting pioneered in postwar New York, projected this fusion perfectly. The result of a combination of European advances in formal composition and native American vigor, Abstract Expressionism was internationalism on canvas, a universal portrait of postwar anxiety and aspiration. Much the same fusion of European and American ideas was exhibited in postwar architecture and fashion. American fashion of the late 1940s was actually a combination of American practicality and European flair. Film noir, the most distinctive style of postwar cinema, fused German expressionism to the American detective story. Modern dance linked jazz to ballet; European composers experimented with jazz; jazz musicians experimented with composition. The atomic bomb was an international effort, as were innovations in radar, aviation, antibiotics, and medical technology. The Nuremberg trials were the product of a burgeoning movement in international jurisprudence; so, too, was the United Nations. Even Keynesian economics, the basis of much postwar prosperity, was the result of an American adaptation of a British theory. Like antibiotics, Abstract Expressionism, and the international style in architecture, Keynesian economics claimed to be applicable almost anywhere. Such a universalism was at the center of the new international culture, embracing, in hidden form, an assumption that had been part of the United States since the moment of its birth: American aspirations are the aspirations of the world; American hope, the hope of mankind.

Liberalism Ascendant

Such universal aspirations had always been implicit in American liberalism, and the United States was unmistakenly more liberal. The broad goals of liberalism—the emancipation of humanity from tyranny and ignorance—were in a sense the goals of the Atlantic Charter, signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. Victory over the Nazis in the war was a triumph for the liberalism the charter enunciated. In religion, law, education, culture, and politics, liberalism was ascendant. Religious life in the late 1940s was more liberal, less given to interfaith intolerance, dogmatic fundamentalism, and institutional authoritarianism than at any previous time in American history. Legal realism triumphed over stare decisis and strict constitutionalism, opening the way for the legal revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. American education became more liberal, professional, and modern, less disposed to doctrinaire instruction. Although censorship was still common, the culture tolerated a greater range of expression, embracing previously forbidden discussions of marital infidelity, sexuality, and substance abuse in popular music, literature, and cinema. Most important, the politics of the period were dominated by the liberal coalition of finance capital, big labor, and ethnic and racial minorities forged by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats. In the 1940s the liberalism of the New Deal was consolidated and institutionalized. Government supervision of American trade, labor disputes, and the business cycle was an accomplished fact. Social Security and other welfare-state compensations for the more socially corrosive aspects of capitalism were in place. Wealth was more evenly distributed than at any time in American history. The introduction of African Americans into political life was proceeding, though at an often frustratingly slow pace. The Four Freedoms Roosevelt articulated in the Atlantic Charter—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—seemed nearly realized by the end of the decade. Historians often discuss the 1940s as the decade in which a long postwar "ideology of liberal consensus" was formed—a bipartisan movement to administer prosperity through welfare and military spending. The high-minded idealism of the New Deal and American liberalism had won World War II and sustained a prosperous peace that seemed nearly unassailable.

Liberalism Assailed

In retrospect, however, the success of liberalism in the 1940s was more apparent than real. The decade of liberal ascendancy also contained the first manifestations of liberalism's later decline. Even as the war consolidated some New Deal measures, it hope-lessly compromised others. Dollar-a-year men who volunteered for government service from the ranks of business during the war turned government priorities toward business after the war. The ideological clarity with which Roosevelt approached politics in 1936 and 1937, clearly distinguishing his populist programs from those of the businessmen he termed "economic royalists," was hopelessly blurred by his association with these same businessmen during the war. American labor's efforts to build industrial democracy in the United States were crushed in the General Motors strike of 1945-1946; big labor suffered a further erosion in power with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The Roosevelt political coalition could not find a successor for him after his death in 1945. Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential bid floundered on the issue of anticommunism, an issue which killed the left wing of the New Deal coalition. Harry S Truman was a logical successor to Roosevelt in domestic policy, being an ardent New Dealer who had supported Roosevelt for years. Three important parts of Truman's Fair Deal—federal aid to education, national health insurance, and support for civil rights—were attempts to extend the New Deal into the 1940s. Truman's rhetoric during the 1948 "give 'em hell" campaign echoed Roosevelt's in 1936, but Truman lacked Roosevelt's finely tuned sense of politics. Roosevelt was apt to do only the politically possible; Truman often pushed the politically impossible and only furthered the resistance to his proposals. Of the three Fair Deal objectives listed above, only support for civil rights was accomplished—and even that goal was achieved only partially and accompanied by political resistance so severe that Southern Democrats bolted the party.

The End of Ideology

Already political opinion in America was changing. Because they were out of power, conservatives nurtured angry grudges against liberal society, establishing the roots of the conservatism that would blossom in the 1970s. The flower of a later conservatism was being seeded: Friedrich Hayek's 1944 economic study, The Road to Serfdom, argued that welfare-state liberalism led to totalitarianism; neo-Thomist educators insisted that progressive education was undermining the moral structure of society; Dixiecrats objected to unwarranted federal interference in the peculiar institution of Jim Crow. Simultaneously, the Old Left in American politics died, expiring from Stalinist abuses, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and postwar prosperity. Even as the Right grumbled on the sidelines and the Left disintegrated, the rhetoric of political debate became more volatile, filled with ugly implications that would have been impossible before World War II. The examples of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were cited so often as to become virtually meaningless. Conservatives charged liberals with "fellow-traveling," immorality, and the abandonment of certainty, all of which supposedly led to cultural barbarism and totalitarianism. Liberals reversed the charges and suggested that conservatives were paving the way toward an all-American brand of fascism. The center held, but only by becoming ever more apolitical. The New Deal demanded a type of ideological thinking that exalted the common man and disapproved of concentrations of wealth. In the charged atmosphere of the late 1940s, however, ideologies were discredited. As political scientist Daniel Bell suggested in a 1948 essay, ideological thinking was becoming bad form. In new suburbs around the old cities, millions of Americans abandoned the New Deal and public politics to indulge their private concerns, bolstered by postwar prosperity.

The Birth of Modern America

Increasingly, Americans tied their futures after the war to economic prosperity rather than New Deal politics. That association, more than any other, would be responsible for the decline of liberalism in the 1970s. In their rise to the ranks of the middle class, working-class Americans forgot that New Deal policies were the basis of their prosperity. The GI Bill, governmental support for collective bargaining, federal support for housing construction, Social Security, military purchases, and highway construction—all were responsible for the creation of the modern middle class. Even more important was the historically unprecedented position of the United States in global trade after World War II, when the United States alone maintained a fully functional economy. After the war the suburbs seemed to spring into existence without any historical, economic, or political context. Most Americans had been poor before the war; by the 1950s it seemed that most Americans had always been middle class. Women had been working in factories since industry first developed in the United States, and during World War II 60 percent of women were working. After the war, however, women were portrayed as if they had always been housewives and mothers. Psychology textbooks posited an "eternal female" who was necessary to sustain the "traditional family." Even in the nineteenth century, however, the United States had the highest divorce rate of any industrialized society in the world.

Tradition and History

The suburbs assumed the values of a traditional world that was disappearing as America became worldly and liberal; in fact, suburbanites invented a traditional world as a refuge from the pressure of modernity, the possibility of nuclear war, and the demands of global leadership. The model American family—prosperous, white, Protestant, churchgoing, car-loving Americans—hardly reflected the often-impoverished, diverse, secular, horse-drawn reality of the American past. The model distorted actual American traditions; but accuracy was not its function. Historian Elaine Tyler May, borrowing a metaphor from the politics of the period, has suggested that a sort of "containment," a type of willful forgetting, went on in the American suburbs of the postwar period. After the ideological warfare of mid-century, few cared to reiterate the often-violent tradition of class warfare in the United States. After the separation of families during the Depression and war, few wished to ponder the unorthodox family arrangements common in American history. After years of struggle during the Depression, few wanted to analyze the precarious historical and political context of economic prosperity. In the rush to embrace a safe tradition, postwar suburbia neglected the rich and often troubling relationship of Americans to their actual past, a past equally filled with courage and cowardice, tragedy and triumph.

PLAN OF THIS VOLUME

This is one of nine volumes in the American Decades series. Each volume will chronicle a single twentieth-century decade from thirteen separate perspectives, broadly covering American life. The volumes begin with a chronology of world events outside of America, which provides a context for American experience. Following are chapters, arranged in alphabetical order, on thirteen categories of American endeavor ranging from business to medicine, from the arts to sports. Each of these chapters contains the following elements: first, a table of contents for the chapter; second, a chronology of significant events in the field; third, Topics in the News, a series, beginning with an overview, of short essays describing current events; fourth, anecdotal sidebars of interesting and entertaining, though not necessarily important, information; fifth, Headline Makers, short biographical accounts of key people during the decade; sixth, People in the News, brief notices of significant accomplishments by people who mattered; seventh, Awards of note in the field (where applicable); eighth, Deaths during the decade of people in the field; and ninth, a list of Publications during or specifically about the decade in the field. In addition, there is a general bibliography at the end of this volume, followed by an index of photographs and an index of subjects.