Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

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."

405,399 United States military personnel died as a result of war-related fighting, and 670,846 suffered non-fatal wounds.

These were small numbers in the wider context of history's bloodiest war, which cost the lives of an estimated 60 million people throughout the world, including some 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis.3

One black man exclaimed bitterly, "Just carve on my tombstone, here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man."8

Though few Americans said so at the time, it was clear that the decision to drop the bombs reflected the broader hatreds that been unleashed during the savagery of fighting.

Most Americans in 1945 also believed firmly that the fighting had been worth it—it had been a Good War.

It also seemed in 1945 that Americans had succeeded in forming an uneasy consensus behind a degree of governmental stimulation of the economy.

Americans, having fought to win the war, expected to dominate the world order to come.

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.

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.

Some 52 percent of farm dwellings, inhabited by more than 25 million people, had no electricity in 1945.1

People still thought in small sums: annual per capita disposable income in current dollars was $1,074 in 1945.

But most of them, polls suggested, had not cherished idealistic notions about destroying fascism or building a brave new world.

"A caste system inherited from Frederick the Great of Prussia and the 18th century British navy is hardly appropriate to the United States . . . the aristocracy-peasantry relationship characteristic of our armed forces has a counterpart nowhere else in American life."8

The clamor of GIs largely succeeded. Demobilization proceeded at a very rapid pace. By June 1946 the number in service had dropped to 3 million, and Congress had agreed to authorize an army of only 1 million by July of 1947.

A form of affirmative action (a phrase of later years), the GI Bill cost $3.7 billion between 1945 and 1949.10

The war, in so many ways a powerful force in the domestic history of twentieth-century America, was an engine that accelerated acculturation.

It was difficult, moreover, to find much of an ecumenical spirit among these religious Americans.

Conservative evangelical groups became more active, forming in 1947 the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and benefiting from the formidable recruiting talents of spellbinders like the youthful Billy Graham, then in the conservative wing of American Protestantism.17

Roughly 22 million people, one-seventh of the population, told census enumerators in 1940 that English was not their native tongue.21

Most southern blacks—at least 70 percent—lived in poverty in 1945.35

All but a few white southerners believed theirs was the superior race, with a natural right to supremacy.36

Racist feelings promoted institutional discrimination and a virtual totality of white power.

The emblem of the Democratic party in Alabama (Republicans did not matter) was a lusty gamecock under a scroll that read WHITE SUPREMACY.39

Resting very close to the surface of these white concerns, especially in the South, were complicated feelings about sex between the races.

Miscegenation was the great open secret of sexual life in the South.40

1939—but all black American men knew that white violence was an ever-present possibility following any kind of "uppity" behavior, no matter how exaggerated by whites, especially if it was thought to threaten the supposed purity of southern white womanhood.

As later events were to demonstrate, this kind of crackdown on Negro protest in the South by no means dampened the determination of blacks to struggle against institutionalized discrimination. On the contrary, many continued to resist:

All-black schools, for instance, had already succeeded in cutting illiteracy among Negroes, from 70 percent in 1880 to 31 percent in 1910 to around 11 percent in 1945.43

Black protest in the North was by contrast much more open in the late 1940s.

The battle against restrictive covenants revealed a key fact about post-World War II racial conflicts in the North: many such fights centered on the efforts of blacks, crowding into northern cities in record numbers, to find decent housing.

In so doing it enshrined residential segregation as a public policy of the United States government.

All these policies helped to hasten the growth of large, institutional ghettos—cities within the central city—in some of the bigger urban areas of the North after 1945.

While blacks crowded into ghettos, whites found ample space in the mushrooming suburbs.

"White flight," indeed, was rendering restrictive covenants unnecessary even before the Supreme Court decision in 1948.

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.

Northern blacks, moreover, could vote. Chicago's South Side had sent a black man, Oscar DePriest, to Congress as early as 1928. Charles Dawson, also black, represented Chicago on Capitol Hill from 1942 to 1970.53

A wholly negative picture of race relations, by focusing on oppression, also tends to slight the vibrancy of certain aspects of black cultural life during the 1940s. These were years of notable vitality and creativity among black artists, writers, intellectuals, and—most audibly—musicians.

READING ABOUT American women in the immediate postwar years, one quickly encounters polar interpretations.

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.

The war indeed accelerated the paid employment of women. The percentage of women (14 and older) who were part of the work force increased from 26 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 1945.

Some wartime work available to women was unprecedented. For the first time women in large numbers found better-paying factory jobs.

Women doing this kind of work often felt proud and empowered. No wonder that Irving Berlin, composing for Annie Get Your Gun in 1946, has Annie Oakley sing out, "Anything you can do, I can do better."

The sudden end to war quickly changed these patterns.

As one historian put it, "Rosie the Riveter had become a file clerk."62 Gender segregation at work was by then greater than in 1900 and sharper than segregation by race.63

By 1950 there were 18 million women working for pay, only a million or so fewer than in 1945.

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

Similarly varied motives impelled the millions of women who entered the job market in the late 1940s (and later). For many, work was a means to greater self-esteem. But for most, especially the large number of married women, the decision to work for pay rested mainly on economic needs.

Attitudes such as these abetted continuing discrimination. Early in the war the army refused to commission women doctors, until an act of Congress forced its hand in 1943.

Contemporary data from the studies of Alfred Kinsey suggested that roughly 22 percent of married women had induced abortions, most of them early in the marriage or late in the child bearing years, and that the majority of single women in his survey who became pregnant resorted to abortion.69