Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

From this unpromising point the campaign turned around for Truman and the Democrats—for four reasons: the parochialism of the Dixiecrats, the political ineptitude of Wallace, the even greater ineptitude of the Republicans, and Truman's own spirited counter-attacks.

Thurmond's linkage of civil rights and Communism was to become a staple of right-wing thinking over the next several decades.

Wallace's close association with Communist ideas indeed cost him dearly in the Cold War climate of 1948.

Dewey was liberal, especially by contrast to Taft and other leading congressional Republicans, and he endorsed a GOP platform in 1948 that was very progressive on civil rights.

But Dewey exhibited two fatal flaws. First, he was personally cold, pompous, and virtually without charisma.

Dewey's other liability was overconfidence.

Between September and election day he traveled a record 31,700 miles, much of it on trains that "whistle-stopped" across the country.

It was a highly satisfying triumph for Truman and for the Democratic party, which regained control of Congress. Among the liberal newcomers was Humphrey of Minnesota.

Truman carried the thirteen largest cities, doing especially well in the poorest and working-class wards.

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.

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.

Truman succeeded, finally, because the majority of Americans were better off in 1948 than they had been in earlier years. The postwar boom—in cars, household appliances, suburbanization, education, real wages—was gathering steam.

As the incumbent in a society of rising expectations he was carried back into office.

Only a small minority of reactionaries thought of tearing down the rudimentary welfare state that FDR had set up in the 1930s.

All this is to offer the heresy that the role of presidential leadership, yet another shadow cast by the Roosevelt years, is often exaggerated.

The radical social activist Michael Harrington once commented that "1948 was the last year of the thirties." He meant specifically that labor unrest and class-consciousness abated amid rising prosperity after 1948.

The first full-scale inaugural since the war, it was also the first to be seen on television. An estimated 10 million people as far west as St. Louis—where the television coaxial cable then terminated—watched the ceremonies.

This was a historic commitment for the United States, which since 1778 had refused to join military alliances in time of peace.

Johnson was blunt, blustery, and highly ambitious, and he aroused a storm when he canceled the "supercarrier" that the navy was counting on as its key weapon of the future.

General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, sided with the air force and called navy leaders "fancy dans" who refused to play on a team "unless they can call the signals."

Low appropriations especially demoralized the army, whose strength had sunk to a low of 591,000 men by the time the Korean War broke out in June 1950.

These were the intelligence in late August that the Soviets had successfully exploded an atomic bomb, and the collapse of the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kaishek that culminated on October 1 in the creation of the Communistic People's Republic of China.

A Red Scare, already an undercurrent in American life, rose ominously in 1949–50, ultimately diverting national politics—and much else—throughout the next four years.

Unfortunately for Acheson and Truman, Americans were in no mood to accept the White Paper's version of history. Alarmed by the rise of Communism, they had also been developing high expectations about the capacity of the country to have its way in the world.

More generally, Americans were frustrated. Why couldn't the United States, the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world, prevent bad things from happening?

In January 1950 Acheson made a widely noted speech in which he excluded Taiwan (and South Korea) from the "defense perimeter" that he said the United States ought to protect.

Most Americans, moreover, believed in the existence of a worldwide Communist conspiracy, in which Mao and Stalin were twin demons.

THESE COMMITMENTS paled before the two most important and long-range policy consequences of the events of 1949: the Truman administration's decision to go ahead with development of the hydrogen bomb, or "Super," in January 1950, and the consensus of top military and foreign policy planners behind one of the key documents of the Cold War, National Security Council Document 68, in April.

But his opposition to development of the Super was not politically inspired. It rested, like Conant's, on a combination of moral revulsion and practical policy considerations.

Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Truman had named to America's UN delegation, came out for it in January.

On January 31, 1950, Truman decided in favor of development. He was influenced in part by the position of the Joint Chiefs, particularly by General Bradley, whom Truman admired greatly.

The world's first thermonuclear explosion took place on November 1, 1952, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific.

The explosion exceeded all expectations, throwing off a fireball five miles high and four miles wide and a mushroom cloud twenty-five miles high and 1,200 miles wide. Eniwetok disappeared, replaced by a hole in the Pacific floor that was a mile long and 175 feet deep.

Eight months later, on August 12, 1953, the Soviets followed suit, setting off a blast in Siberia.

The conclusions of NSC-68 rested on one key assumption, which reflected the grand expectations that pervaded America in the postwar era: economic growth in the United States made such a huge expansion of defense spending easy to manage, and without major sacrifices at home.

Then, as throughout in the postwar era, grand expectations about American economic and industrial growth promoted globalistic foreign and military policies.

This approach required the United States to be prepared to put out fires all over the globe.33

In 1949 the American GNP was roughly four times as great as that of the Soviet Union, which remained an inefficient and relatively unproductive society.

Spending declined a little when the Korean War ended but still ranged between $40 and $53.5 billion every year between 1954 and 1964.

On January 21, ten days before Truman decided for the Super, a federal jury brought thirteen months of hotly contested litigation to a close by finding Alger Hiss, accused of having been a spy for the Soviets in the 1930s, guilty of perjury.

On February 9 Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin alleged that Communists infested the American State Department.

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 turbulent years of the 1930s and especially of World War II did much to lay the foundation for the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s.

In 1940 Congress approved the Smith Act, which made it a criminal offense for anyone to "teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of . . . government by force or violence." People accused under the law did not have to be shown to have acted in any way, only to have advocated action.

Wartime patriotism spurred other, much more flagrant violations of civil liberties, notably the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in "relocation" camps during most of the war.

Less obvious but of long-run significance was the hyper-patriotism that developed among many American people.

The patriotic wartime injunction "Be American" competed with earlier ethnic or class identifications.

The atheistic dogmas of orthodox Marxism repelled Catholics and other religious believers.

World War II had lasting effects in one other, less definable way: like most armed conflicts it toughened popular feelings. The fighting, people concluded, had been necessary. Sacrifice was noble. "Appeasers" were "soft."

Those who were "soft" ran the risk of being defined as deviant.