Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States Book 10)

by James T. Patterson

Many things that middle-class Americans took for granted by the 1960s scarcely existed for the 139.9 million people who inhabited the forty-eight states in 1945 or for the 151.7 million in 1950. Consider a few of these things: supermarkets, malls, fast-food chains, residential air-conditioning, ranch-style homes, freezers, dishwashers, and detergents. Also ballpoint pens, hi-fis, tape recorders, long-playing records, Polaroid cameras, computers, and transistors. And four-lane highways, automatic transmissions and direction signals, tubeless tires, and power steering. In 1945 only 46 percent of households had a telephone; to get long distance, people paid a good deal and asked for an operator. In 1950, 10 percent of families had television sets and 38 percent had never seen a TV program. Although 33 million of America's roughly 38 million households in 1945 had radios, these were for the most part bulky things cased in wooden cabinets, and they took time to warm up. Some 52 percent of farm dwellings, inhabited by more than 25 million people, had no electricity in 1945.

Culturally as well as demographically the United States remained in many ways a world of farms, small towns, and modest-sized cities—places where neighbors knew each other and in which people took local pride. Mail came twice a day to homes.

Seizing chances to move ahead, more than 8 million "vets" took advantage of the "52–20" provision of the GI Bill of Rights, which provided $20 per week for up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment (or earnings of less than $100 a month). A form of affirmative action (a phrase of later years), the GI Bill cost $3.7 billion between 1945 and 1949.10 Other veterans, including thousands who had married hastily while on wartime leave, could not adjust to married life. The divorce rate in 1945 shot up to double that of the prewar years, to 31 divorces for every 100 marriages—or 502,000 in all. Although the divorce rate dropped in 1946 and returned to prewar levels by the early 1950s, its jump in 1945 exposed the rise of domestic tensions in the immediate aftermath of war.

Laws from the 1920s had drastically reduced legal immigration, thereby cutting the percentage of foreign-born people in the United States in 1945 to around 8 percent. This was the lowest percentage—to that time—in twentieth-century American history. But the nation was still far from having become a melting pot in which ethnic and religious differences had fused into a common "American" nationality.

Some 71.7 million Americans, more than half the population, said they belonged to religious groups in 1945, roughly 43 million of them in Protestant denominations, 23 million Catholic, and nearly 5 million identifying themselves as Jewish.15 These people inhabited an increasingly secular world in which theological dictates carried less weight than in earlier generations but in which church membership was nonetheless increasing, from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 55 percent in 1950 (and to an all-time high of 69 percent by 1959).16 Whether church-going much affected personal behavior of course sparked many debates, but the upward trend in attendance was noteworthy and impressive.

Thanks in part to the rapid mechanization of cotton production in the early 1940s, which ultimately threw millions of farm laborers out of work, and in part to the opening up of industrial employment in the North during the wartime boom, roughly a million blacks (along with even more whites) moved from the South during the 1940s. Another 1.5 million Negroes left the South in the 1950s. This was a massive migration in so short a time—one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history—and it was often agonizingly stressful.

groundswell of protest was indeed growing: membership in the NAACP, by far the most important civil rights organization, increased from 50,000 to 450,000 during the war.

There was irony here, of course, for white men continued, as they had throughout American history, to demand sexual favors from economically and legally defenseless black women. Miscegenation was the great open secret of sexual life in the South.40 But state laws criminalized interracial sex as well as racially mixed marriages. (Until 1956 Hollywood's Motion Picture Code forbade interracial marriage to be shown; no black man embraced a white woman on screen until 1957.)41 And woe to black men in the South who seemed too friendly with white women.

the Federal Housing Adminstration, which distributed billions of dollars in low-cost mortgage loans in the late 1940s, thereby underwriting much of the suburban expansion of the era, openly screened out applicants according to its assessment of people who were "risks." These were mainly blacks, Jews, or other "unharmonious racial or nationality groups." In so doing it enshrined residential segregation as a public policy of the United States government.

While blacks crowded into ghettos, whites found ample space in the mushrooming suburbs. In Chicago, 77 percent of home-building between 1945 and 1960 took place in suburban areas. As of 1960 only 2.9 percent of people in these suburbs were black, roughly the same percentage as had lived in Chicago suburbs in 1940.

The result was what one careful study has called an "era of hidden violence" and of "chronic urban guerilla warfare."

Whites also staged large-scale "housing riots" to push blacks away from their neighborhoods. One of these, in Cicero near Chicago, drew a looting and burning mob of between 2,000 and 5,000—to drive one black family out of an apartment. Only the police and 450 National Guardsmen brought an end to the violence.

This grim picture tends to focus only on discrimination and therefore to underplay the sense of possibility that many blacks nonetheless cherished at the time. More black people than ever before, after all, were escaping the specially vicious world of Jim Crow in the South. The North was different! Millions of blacks, at last, had jobs in the industrial sector, which seemed prosperous in the late 1940s. For such people a stable family life, with a future for the children, seemed within reach: most Negro families at that time were headed by two parents. Blacks who wanted no part of whites—thousands felt this way—could find a variegated world of black institutions in the growing Negro neighborhoods of the major metropolises.

First, many people—from liberals like Myrdal to ethnics and blacks themselves—anticipated the possibilities of progress: World War II seemed a turning point in the nation's quest for greater ethnic acculturation and racial equality. Like the veterans who considered 1945 a chance—at last—for the Good Life, many Negroes and "new-stock" Americans of the era were decidedly hopeful, especially in contrast to the discouraging years of the immediate past. They were developing unusally high expectations. Still, and second, it is foolish to wax romantic about the rate of ethnic acculturation, or especially about the status of black people in the 1940s. Most blacks, northern as well as southern, remained very poor; the vast majority never went to a nightclub or stayed in a hotel; many lacked radios—or even electricity; they encountered discrimination and rejection almost every day of their

In 1945 (the last year in which men outnumbered women in the United States), there were 69.9 million women in the forty-eight states. They differed greatly in age, class standing, race, regional background, and family situation. Their attitudes were naturally complex and often ambivalent, and their experiences obviously changed over time. It will not do to erect some transhistorical "model types" by which most American women can be categorized.

First, World War II—in so many ways a driving social force—changed the lives of millions of women, bringing them into the marketplace in record numbers and into new and sometimes better-paying kinds of jobs. Second, demobilization drove many of these women from such jobs, but it only briefly slowed what was already a powerful long-range trend toward greater female participation in the market. Third, neither during the war nor afterward did most women think they were making an either-or choice between family and work. The majority gradually came to need both, at least for stretches of their lives, and encountered all the satisfactions and tribulations of juggling the two. Fourth, American women did such juggling amid a dominant cultural milieu that continued to place traditional notions of femininity above feminist quests for equal rights. As in the past, it was ordinarily expected that women be nurturant, deferential, and maternal. Some things change, some remain pretty much the same.

The rise in female employment was one of the most powerful demographic trends of the postwar era.

These were baby boom years. Women in the 1940s were marrying younger, having more children, buying an ever-greater variety of consumer goods, and looking for ways to supplement household income. Once their youngest child was in school, millions went to work to help with the bills. This is not to argue that women considered "feminist" reasons and rejected them; motives are not so easily disentangled. It is rather to say that most women continued, as they normally had done throughout American history, to place family concerns first.

Charles E. Wilson, head of General Motors, was known to have received a salary in 1943 of $459,014. In late 1945 around one-fifth of working families in American cities received less than $1,500 in total cash income for the year—at a time when the average for full-time employees was $2,190.10

By mid-19 50 the Red Scare in unions had triumphed, leaving anti-Communists in firm control of the labor movement in the United States. For this and other reasons, many unions operated thereafter more as special interest groups than as supporters of broad-based liberal ideas such as those that Reuther had emphasized in 1945. Strong within the Democratic party in industrial areas, unions were also something of a prisoner of the party, unable to do much in politics without it. In non-industrial areas—and among the masses of blacks, working women, and other non-unionized Americans—they had little influence at all. To committed social reformers in the United States, the stagnation of organized labor by 1950 was both cause and consequence of a broader political stalemate that blocked liberal goals at the time.

After 1945 federal taxes dipped a little but never sank to prewar levels: income taxes reached a postwar low of 5.9 percent of GNP in 1949, by which time 35.6 million people were filing tax returns. Scarcely looking back, the nation went from a system of class taxation to one of mass taxation during the war.

Stimson and others might well have pondered more fully a contemporary adage: "The hand that signs the war contract is the hand that shapes the future." For the fact of the matter was that the war accelerated development of what many later critics, President Dwight Eisenhower among them, called a military-industrial complex. After the war many corporate leaders lost defense contracts. But they had amassed considerable power and prestige in the war years, and they reasserted themselves thereafter with uncommon relish, spending large sums on lobbying, campaign finance, litigation, public relations, advertising, philanthropy, and sponsorship of research in efforts to broaden their influence.

Later, when crime rates exploded in the 1960s, people looked nostalgically to the 1940s, failing to realize the special demographic reasons that had helped to make the low rates possible. Still, it was a fact that most neighborhoods were able to control crime in the late 1940s; public disorder was only here and there a major worry.

From the perspective of later years, it is clear that nostalgia for the late 1940s can be misplaced in other ways, for millions of people—especially blacks and Mexican-Americans—did not share in the blessings of prosperity. If there had been a "poverty rate" at that time, it would have identified at least 40 million people, 30 percent of the population, as "poor" by the standards of the era. Those standards, moreover, were harsher than in later years of higher expectations about life. In 1947 one-third of American homes had no running water, two-fifths had no flush toilets, three-fifths lacked central heat, and four-fifths were heated by coal or wood.

The money income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families (and unrelated individuals) in 1947 was 19 percent of the national total; the richest 20 percent had 46 percent of income ; the lowest 20 percent had 3.5 percent. Studies of the mobility of individuals, however, reveal a vast amount of movement up (and down) the income scale.16 Millions of optimistic Americans, especially younger people, thought that they could get ahead.

Critics also decried changes at the secondary level, especially what they thought was the anti-intellectual focus on non-academic "life adjustment" courses pushed by "progressive" educators. In Denver, Colorado, high school students took part in a unit on "What is expected of a boy on a date?" It dealt with matters such as "Do girls want to pet?" In Des Moines, Iowa, teachers presented "correct social usage" as part of a course in "Developing an Effective Personality." Advocates of such courses maintained that they taught socially acceptable behavior. Critics, who grew louder in the 1950s, retorted that schools were abandoning rigorous academic standards and "dumbing down" the curricula.

There has always been an extraordinary amount of uninformed opinion about what actually goes on in the widely varying classrooms of American public schools.

The government had much to do with this boom. Congress authorized increased spending for home loans by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA). The terms that these agencies offered were extraordinarily generous, especially by contrast to the policies of private bankers before the war. Then, prospective home-buyers had often had to put down substantial down payments, of 50 percent or more, and to pay off mortgages in a short time, often ten years. The FHA and VA revolutionized the old system, offering mortgages of up to 90 percent of the value of the home and allowing up to thirty years to pay them off. Interest rates on the mortgages were normally around 4 to 4.5 percent. The VA permitted many veterans to purchase homes with virtually no down payment. By 1950 these two agencies were insuring 36 percent of all new non-farm mortgages; by 1955 they were handling 41 percent.

Racial segregation of American neighborhoods was virtually ubiquitous, especially in the new suburbs, and harder to change than any other aspect of race relations. It reflected a culturally powerful desire of people to have neighbors like themselves—similar in class as well as race. Most of the postwar suburban developments were indeed homogeneous economically, whether stable working-class like the Levittowns, middle-class like much of Park Forest, or upper-middle-class.

And then: the boom. In May 1946, nine months after V-J Day, births increased from a low in February of 206,387 to 233,452. In June they rose again, to 242,302. By October they numbered 339,499 and were occurring at a record rate. Landon Jones, historian of the boom, notes that "the cry of the baby was heard across the land."52 By the end of the year an all-time high number of 3.4 million babies had been born, 20 percent more than in 1945. They came in time to abet the sales of a new book, one of the nation's great publishing success stories: The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock, M.D.

The boom was not the result of parents having huge families, but rather of so many people deciding to marry young, to start a larger family quickly, and to have two, three, or four children in rapid succession.

To generalize about a "generation," as if sharp differences of class, race, gender, and region did not exist within an age cohort, is foolish. Were people born in 1946 so sharply distinguishable (except in numbers) from people born in 1945? Moreover, the span of years from 1946 to 1964 obviously covers a good deal of ground. Early "baby boomers" had very different life experiences from later ones. Americans born in 1946 confronted the turmoil of the 1960s and of the Vietnam War.

By the mid-1940s many of these officials—Acheson and Kennan above all—tended to become critical, even contemptuous, of the less well educated, democratically elected "politicians" who had traditionally played major roles in American foreign policy-making during the more relaxed and amateur days before World War II. 51 In this way the war, and the Cold War years that followed, did much to change the way that foreign policy was conducted. Henceforth it was to depend more on non-elected officials who circulated in and out of private life (especially the law and high finance in New York and Washington), and less on members of Congress and other elected politicians, who necessarily (Establishmentarians thought) catered to ill-informed constituencies and pressure groups at home.

Underlying their thinking were two other assumptions. The first was that the United States must maintain a strong economic and military posture. Without this, policy would not be credible. This quest for "credibility"—a consistent concern of virtually all American leaders after 1945—lay at the center of United States diplomacy throughout the Cold War years.53 The second was that the United States had the means—economic, industrial, and military—to control the behavior of other nations. This belief, which became widely shared by the American people during the postwar years, helped the Establishmentarians to shape what the historian John Gaddis calls the "inner-directed" nature of postwar American foreign policy: it often depended less on what other nations did or did not do than on what the experts thought the United States had the capacity to do.54 This capacity, the Establishmentarians thought, was vast, and they developed correspondingly grand expectations concerning the ability of the nation to prevail in the international arena.

neither Truman nor his advisers resisted the powerful bureaucratic momentum that had accumulated by mid-1945. Truman also decided as he did because he thought that the Japanese—whose most influential military leaders seemed determined to fight on—were "savages, ruthless, merciless, and fanatic." Like many people in 1945, the President was swept up in the passionate emotions of a long and catastrophic war. Finally, Truman felt a considerable responsibility as commander-in-chief. He believed it his duty to put an end to the fighting—especially to American casualties—as soon as possible.

Still, the Truman Doctrine was a highly publicized commitment of a sort the administration had not previously undertaken. Its sweeping rhetoric, promising that the United States should aid all "free people" being subjugated, set the stage for innumerable later ventures that led to globalistic commitments. It was in these ways a major step.

But most of these qualifications do not detract from the remarkable success of the Marshall Plan, which funneled $13.34 billion in aid to western Europe between 1948 and 1952. Welcomed eagerly by suffering European nations, the assistance hastened a very impressive recovery. It probably promoted greater political stability, if for no other reason than that it demonstrated the commitment of the United States to that part of the world.

The National Security Act created two other agencies that were later to become important parts of America's defense bureaucracy. One, the National Security Council (NSC), was to be controlled by the White House, not—as Forrestal had wanted—by the Pentagon. The other, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), promised to give the United States—at last—a permanent intelligence-gathering bureaucracy.

The apocalyptic character of the Cold War owed even more, however, to the peculiarly suspicious, dictatorial, and often hostile stance of Stalin. This truly alarmed policy-makers and over time aroused popular attitudes. In these years it was the Soviet Union, more than the United States, whose behavior—especially in eastern Europe—seemed alarming in the world. Not just the United States but also other Western nations concluded that "appeasement" would be disastrous. "Credibility" required that they resist. A defter American administration might have coped more sure-handedly with these problems than did Truman's, thereby muting to some degree the extremes of Cold War hostility. Given the understandable determination of the United States and its allies to contain the Soviets, however, there is no way that serious friction could have been avoided. Some sort of "Cold War"—even a quasi-apocalyptic one—seems as close to being inevitable as anything can be in history.

The fate of Truman's quest for a national system of health insurance clearly revealed the power of special interests. His proposal was fairly conservative, calling for care to be financed by a tax of 4 percent on the first $3,600 of personal income. General government revenue would assist many among the poor. A powerful medical lobby headed by the American Medical Association (AMA) attacked the plan as socialistic, and conservatives in Congress agreed. The plan never came close to passage.18 Instead, the AMA backed the so-called Hill-Burton bill, which Congress approved in 1946. It provided federal aid for hospital construction, thereby pleasing building company interests as well as medical leaders. Between 1946 and 1975 some $4 billion in federal funds supported this program, which ultimately helped to produce large excess in hospital beds. The Hill-Burton Act mainly benefited doctors, hospital administrators, and the rising network of medical insurers such as Blue Cross-Blue Shield.

Truman's appointment of such a liberal committee, and his endorsement of the report, stamped him as a friend of civil rights. No American President before him, FDR included, had taken such a strong stand.

Thurmond's linkage of civil rights and Communism was to become a staple of right-wing thinking over the next several decades. Beyond the Deep South, however, he had little credibility as a presidential candidate. Even there, representatives and senators were reluctant to bolt the Democratic party, lest they be denied seniority and other trappings of power in the congressional session of 1949.

Two groups in the Democratic coalition were probably of special importance to the Democrats in 1948. One was organized labor, which except for Lewis's United Mine Workers was pro-Truman. Labor, to be sure, was hardly all-powerful: Truman even lost Michigan, stronghold of the UAW. But labor organizers worked hard for Truman and against Wallace, often Red-baiting him. The Political Action Committee of the CIO effectively registered union members and got them to the polls. Although the AFL issued no formal endorsement, it created Labor's League for Political Action, which printed and distributed reams of literature critical of the GOP and of the Taft-Hartley "slave labor" Act. The AFL had never before been so active in American politics.64 The other group were commercial farmers. While Dewey and Warren were largely ignoring the rural areas, Truman made some eighty speeches in farm states during the campaign.

All this is to offer the heresy that the role of presidential leadership, yet another shadow cast by the Roosevelt years, is often exaggerated. Presidents of course can take executive actions, especially in foreign affairs, that have dramatic effects. But only sometimes, for many snags—bureaucratic inertia, the capriciousness of public opinion, partisan opposition, interest group pressures, Congress—hem in presidential designs. In domestic policies the hemming-in is ordinarily tight indeed, as it was during Truman's first term. A decent, moderately liberal man, Truman labored to prevent the unraveling of the political design that Roosevelt and the New Deal had stitched together. In this modest holding action he largely succeeded.

In July 1949 the Senate overwhelmingly (82 to 13) ratified American participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The pact committed the twelve signatories to treat an attack on one as an attack upon all.5 This was a historic commitment for the United States, which since 1778 had refused to join military alliances in time of peace. When Cold War tensions increased in 1950, Truman sought to develop the military potential of the pact. After a "great debate" in early 1951, American troops were assigned in April to NATO forces in Europe, where they remained for decades.

As Lovett put it in an apocalyptic memo: We must realize that we are now in a mortal conflict; that we are now in a war worse than any we have experienced. Just because there is not much shooting as yet does not mean that we are in a cold war. It is not a cold war; it is a hot war. The only difference between this and previous wars is that death comes more slowly and in a different fashion.30

McCarthy was in fact a Joe-Come-Lately to the Red Scare, whose roots require a quasi-archaeological probe into the American past. Americans have periodically lashed out at radicals, alleged subversives, aliens, immigrants, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and other vulnerable groups who could be blamed for complex problems. The Red Scare in America following the Bolshevik Revolution was only the most flagrant of many outbursts, driven both by the government and by popular vigilantism, against left-wing activists. These outbursts revealed the volatility of popular opinion, the growing capacity of the State to repress dissent, and the frailty of civil libertarian thought and action in the United States.

In 1940 twenty-one states required loyalty oaths of teachers. There was therefore little reason to suppose that school boards, principals, or college administrators would behave much differently from other American officials caught up in the Red Scare.

Though estimates vary, it is thought that 600 or so public school teachers and professors in these years lost their jobs because they were smeared by accusations that they were Communists or Communist sympathizers. Blacklists often ensured that they would not be hired elsewhere.59

senior Democrat, John Rankin of Mississippi, was an especially rabid antiSemite and racist. Denouncing civil rights activity in 1950, Rankin exclaimed, "This is a part of the communistic program, laid down by Stalin approximately thirty years ago. Remember communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself."68 Another HUAC power,