Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

Few women in the mid-1940s could accept such extreme views, but most well-known female political leaders readily asserted that women were in some ways a "weaker" sex that needed protection under the law.

Perkins, Roosevelt, and leaders of the government's Women's Bureau therefore opposed approval of the gender-blind Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1923, which affirmed that "equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of sex."

The debates between the pro- and anti-ERA camps were bitter and sometimes nasty.

Values about matters like gender roles—or religion and race—normally evolve only gradually, and the postwar era was no exception.

The song revealed a second key fact about many American blue-collar workers during the war: they took great pride in their unions.

By 1945 there were 14.8 million union members. In that year they composed 35.5 percent of total non-agricultural employment and 21.9 percent of employment overall.2

Unions had not only grown by 1945; they also constituted a vanguard of American liberalism.

More than at any other time in American history, the union movement in 1945 defined the left liberal limit of what was possible in politics.4

The postwar years frustrated the American Left, which faced increasingly harsh Red-baiting after 1945.

Yet even unions, poised as they were for further gains in 1945, contended with large obstacles in the late 1940s, a time of strong corporate and conservative resistance to social reform.

But friends as well as foes recognized that Reuther was an articulate, principled, and even visionary man. A former Socialist, he had been beaten by Ford Motor Company thugs during the strikes of the 1930s.

His vision incorporated much that the Left was seeking at the time: a governmentally guaranteed "annual wage," a much-expanded welfare state, civil rights protection for abused minorities, federal legislation to promote better education and health care, and workers' control of key decisions about production and technological development.9

The year 1946 ultimately became the most contentious in the history of labor-management relations in the United States, with 4,985 stoppages by 4.6 million workers, or about one of every fourteen Americans in the labor force.

At that time few American corporations had pension plans.

The labor contracts of the war years, the late 1940s, and the 1950s also gave slowly increasing numbers of union members better benefits: health insurance, life insurance, paid vacations, and old-age pensions.

Liberals also supported federal aid to education, higher minimum wages, and even some form of government-provided health insurance.

More and more, union leaders concentrated on securing better private benefits. The 1940s, a time of significant expansion of governmental social welfare in many western European countries, in fact solidified the privatization of social welfare in the United States.

Unions, moreover, grew only slowly after World War II.

Growth areas after 1945 were increasingly in white-collar work and service employment.

The New Republic, a leading liberal journal, called Truman's congressional message the "most vicious piece of anti-union legislation ever introduced by an American President."20

If railroads were important, coal was vital to the economy in 1946. It still drove 95 percent of locomotives and furnished 62 percent of electric power.

Acting quickly, they drafted the so-called Taft-Hartley bill in early 1947.

Taft-Hartley was a bold effort to weaken the pro-labor Wagner Act of 1935.

States instead could pass what became known as "right-to-work" laws that were expected to impose major obstacles to union organizing.

Taft-Hartley aroused storms of outrage from labor leaders, who damned it as "fascistic" and as a "slave labor act."

In fact, Taft-Hartley was far from a "slave labor act." The ban on closed shops, to be sure, lessened the control that a few strong unions had had over hiring. But most unions managed to live with the law.

By the 1950s most observers agreed that Taft-Hartley was no more disastrous for workers than the Wagner Act had been for employers.

Where unions were strong, they usually managed all right; when they were weak, new laws did them little additional harm.29

Equally worrisome to liberals, the failure exposed the enduring divisiveness of race, which had managed—as so often in United States history—to damage the potential for working-class solidarity.

The struggle in Birmingham revealed the fourth, and sometimes nastiest, conflict that damaged labor solidarity in the immediate postwar years. This was the battle between Communist and anti-Communist union leaders.33

In all, twelve of thirty-five CIO affiliates in 1946 had a Communist or strongly pro-Soviet leadership.

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.

Deficits, indeed, had been a fiscal reality since 1930, had mushroomed during the war to a scarcely conceivable peak of $54 billion in 1943, and were widely believed to have been an engine of wartime prosperity.

The Supreme Court by 1945 had unambiguously accepted these ideas about the economic obligations of the State.

Scarcely looking back, the nation went from a system of class taxation to one of mass taxation during the war.43

With the advantages of hindsight, however, it is now clear that war-related growth in government also had malignant consequences.

The FBI was to become an extraordinarily dangerous force in American politics after 1945.44

Some of the vengefulness that characterized the FBI pervaded postwar politics in general. Optimists who thought that partisan rivalry was just politics as usual underestimated how bitterly many Republicans (and conservatives generally) resented Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Theirs was a politics of revenge that led easily to excesses of Red-baiting, even during the war itself.

Partisanship flared as intensely in the late 1940s and early 1950s as at any other time in modern United States history.

"If you are going to . . . go to war . . . in a capitalist country," Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained, "you had better let business make money out of the process or business won't work."45

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.

But in most situations the leading corporate figures of the postwar era were agreed in their opposition to expansion of the New Deal.46

In effect these leaders were pressing for a government that would largely do the bidding of big business.

A final answer is that the economy was flourishing, thereby encouraging people to rely more on private effort than on governmentally sponsored social changes.48

As the compromises of labor unions revealed, the emergent prosperity of the immediate postwar years slowly softened class conflicts and resentments. It also helped to moderate popular pressure for State-sponsored liberal programs.

For all these reasons, the majority of politically influential Americans in the late 1940s (and 1950s) championed a social order that they believed rewarded individual effort and an economic order that continued to be the most thoroughly commercialized in the world.50

There were of course other reasons for the political stalemate of the late 1940s, high among them the rise of Cold War issues to the top of the national agenda.

Then and later the most socially progressive Americans recognized ruefully that World War II had strengthened many of the conservative values and interest groups of the prewar culture.

Economic growth was indeed the most decisive force in the shaping of attitudes and expectations in the postwar era. The prosperity of the period broadened gradually in the late 1940s, accelerated in the 1950s, and soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s.