AMERICA WAS BOOMING. America was at war. Men and women were working again. Men and women were dying. There were dreams of a new world order. There were fears of a new Depression. For Americans, more than for any other combatants, World War II was a paradoxical experience -- simultaneously horrifying and exhilarating. For all the fervor with which Americans committed themselves to a great national cause, they were terrified at the possibility of losing the struggle -- a possibility that seemed particularly real in that first difficult year after Pearl Harbor -- and of having to live in a world dominated by tyranny. Even as the war neared its end and victory seemed assured, optimism mingled with doubt; and several very different ideas about the nation, the world and the future seized the American imagination. Fifty years later, many of those ideas seem relics of a more innocent time. But perhaps for that very reason, they resonate still in the stories World War II veterans tell about themselves, and in the imaginations of their children and grandchildren.
FEW AMERICANS WHO GAVE SERIOUS THOUGHT TO WHAT THE WAR had been about could avoid feeling profound anxiety in 1945, as they contemplated the beginning of the postwar era. World War II had revealed a human capacity for evil and destruction that exceeded even the darkest assumptions of previous eras. It had been a war against militarized tyrannies, a war to stop nearly a decade of brutal, naked expansionism. It was a war to avenge what Franklin Roosevelt called the "dastardly" Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And gradually, as news of the Holocaust had filtered out of Europe to an incredulous world, it became for some Americans a war against genocide, against a madness so terrible that many people, even when faced with incontrovertible evidence of its existence, found the knowledge of it unassimilable.
How could anyone absorb such horror and not fear for the future of mankind? A world that could create so terrible a war, a world that could produce Auschwitz and Dachau, the Katyn Forest, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a world capable of such profound evil and such inconceivable destruction: it was necessary, some men and women now began to argue, to regard such a world suspiciously, even fearfully.
For some Americans, those fears led to an increased skepticism of the power of government -- a skepticism driven by the kind of state power that in Germany, Italy and Japan had produced tyranny, war and genocide. Many liberals continued to argue that an active government need not lead a nation down so dark a path. But others were less certain. In 1944, the Austrian-emigre economist Friedrich Hayek published "The Road to Serfdom," a stark warning against any increase in the powers of government (including, he made clear, the New Deal reforms of the 1930's). For any such increase, he argued, represented a step toward fascism. "It is necessary now," he wrote in his impassioned introduction, "to state the unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose fate we are in some danger of repeating." "The Road to Serfdom" was a major best seller. Not unlike Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" decades later, it captured some of the popular anxieties of its moment.
Less conservative figures rejected the starkness of Hayek's warnings. But they, too, were suddenly racked with doubts. Among them was the great liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. "The rise of totalitarianism," he noted somberly late in the war, "has prompted the democratic world to view all collectivist answers to our social problems with increased apprehension." Hence "a wise community will walk warily and test the effect of each new adventure before further adventures."Continue reading the main story
For some, the lessons of the war included a deeper challenge to one of the nation's oldest faiths. Americans, they argued, must resist the temptation to think of themselves in their hour of triumph as a chosen people. No nation could afford to revel too much in its own virtue because in doing so it might ignore the darkness near the center of its (and every society's) soul. Niebuhr spoke for many liberals when he wrote of the dangers of "a deep layer of Messianic consciousness in the mind of America" and warned of liberal culture's "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God in history." Americans, he said, would do well to remember that "no nation is sacred and unique. . . . Providence has not set Americans apart from lesser breeds. We too are part of history's seamless web."
But Niebuhr's statement was obviously meant to refute a competing assumption. As it suggests, there were also very different cultural forces at work in America during World War II. The war, after all, had been that rare thing in American life: a universally shared experience, a truly collaborative, collective effort (perhaps the nation's last) that had engaged the energies of almost everyone and had propelled the nation to victory and prosperity. As terrible as they knew the war itself to be, the men and women who remained in the United States -- thousands of miles from the fighting and the death -- drew considerable satisfaction, even joy, from their experiences in the war years.
They did so in large part because the war had brought an end at last to the Great Depression and had ushered in a great economic boom that would last, with only a few interruptions, for 30 years. The vast productive power of the United States supplied its own armed forces and those of its allies with airplanes, ships, tanks and ammunition. It fed, clothed and housed the American people. And it helped feed, clothe and house much of the rest of the world as well. Alone among the major nations, the United States faced the future in 1945 with an intact and thriving industrial economy.
Abundance created a striking buoyancy in American life during the early 1940's. Suddenly, people had money to spend again and -- despite the many shortages of consumer goods -- at least some things to spend it on. The theater and movie industries did record business. Resort hotels, casinos and race tracks were jammed. Advertisers, and at times even the Government, exhorted Americans to support the war effort on the grounds that victory would insure a future of material comfort and consumer choice for themselves and their children. "Your people are giving their lives in useless sacrifice," The Saturday Evening Post wrote in a mock letter to the leaders of wartime Japan. "Ours are fighting for a glorious future of mass employment, mass production and mass distribution and ownership." Even troops at the front seemed at times to justify their efforts with reference to the comforts of home more than to the character of the enemy or the ideals America claimed to be defending. "They are fighting for home," the writer John Hersey once wrote from Guadalcanal (with at least a trace of dismay), because "home is where the good things are -- the generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie."
And yet, as Hersey's assessment suggests, abundance was not necessarily the enemy of idealism. Democracy, he argued, was part of the mix. In the 1930's, the fear was often voiced that democracy had exhausted itself because it had failed to produce the economic success on which a good society depended. By 1945, democracy had become America's central "fighting faith," triumphantly vindicated by prosperity and prepared to take on new challenges, both at home and abroad.
NOWHERE WAS THE CONFLUENCE OF ABUNDANCE AND democracy clearer than in the experiences of African-Americans during the war. Prosperity transformed the economic circumstances of many black men and women; the war -- and its democratic rationale -- transformed their expectations.
Nearly two million African-Americans left the rural South in the 1940's, most of them in search of the industrial jobs in the North that the war had helped produce. Among the results of this massive migration were new demands for racial justice. A. Philip Randolph's threat to stage a great march on Washington in 1941 spurred Franklin Roosevelt to create the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which sought to guarantee blacks access to jobs in war industries. But protests continued throughout the war. In Washington, Detroit and other cities, there were demonstrations against discrimination -- picketing, sit-ins, at times violence -- that anticipated the civil rights movement of the 60's.
Early in 1944, the publication of a remarkable book -- Gunnar Myrdal's "American Dilemma" -- helped galvanize the urgency of their cause. Myrdal, an eminent Swedish sociologist whom the Carnegie Foundation had commissioned in 1938 to supervise a major examination of America's "race problem," described the "American dilemma" in part as an economic problem -- the failure of American society to extend its riches to its black citizens. But it was also a moral dilemma -- a problem in the hearts and minds of white Americans, a problem born of the impossible attempt to reconcile a commitment to freedom and democracy with the willingness to deny one group of citizens a set of basic rights guaranteed to everyone else. In the shadow of Nazi tyranny, such a contradiction seemed to Myrdal -- and to many readers of his book -- especially glaring. "An American Dilemma" helped define a moment in history, and its reputation grew so rapidly that to many Americans, white and black, its findings soon came to seem almost unassailable. The war didn't provoke a stern resolve to address what most Americans still called "the Negro problem," but it altered the country's racial geography. A system of segregation and oppression that had been dismally stable for more than half a century would never be stable again.
IN MUCH THE SAME AMBIGUOUS WAY, THE WAR ENCOURAGED many women to question their place in American life. More than 4.5 million women joined the paid work force during World War II (raising the total number of working women by almost a third). Many of them took traditionally male jobs that were suddenly vacant as young men left the factories to join the military -- hence the famous image of Rosie the Riveter. And a lot of them found the experience transforming. In the absence of fathers, brothers, husbands and boyfriends, many women lived, worked and traveled alone for the first time in their lives. Some joined unions. Others wore uniforms. For some, it was an experience of unprecedented freedom; as a female aircraft worker later recalled, "It really opened up another viewpoint on life."
The popular folklore of the time depicted Rosie the Riveter as a woman pitching in to win the war but eager to get home to her family. In fact, most working women came to the end of the war determined not to resume a purely domestic life. Some lost their jobs when peace arrived and the men came home, but most of those who did looked for work somewhere else. The number of females in the paid work force never declined to its prewar levels, and it continued to grow throughout the 1950's and beyond.
The war created very different expectations among many men, especially those at the front -- expectations that they would return to a world where things were more or less the way they had been before. Fighter pilots gave their planes female names and painted bathing beauties on their fuselages. Sailors pasted pinups inside their lockers; infantrymen carried them (along with pictures of wives, mothers and girlfriends) in their knapsacks. Such images were not just a reflection of desire. They were a reflection of how many soldiers and sailors wanted to remember home.
The most popular wartime female icon was Betty Grable -- five million pictures of her found their way into the hands of fighting men by 1945. She was a mildly erotic figure to be sure. But as the historian Robert Westbrook has noted, she was not really a sex goddess. In her films, she generally played wholesome, innocent young women, the kind any guy would want to marry. And she became a model at the front for the supportive, nurturing girlfriend or wife many servicemen dreamed of finding on their return. After she married the bandleader Harry James and had a child in 1943, the men at the front seemed to find her even more appealing. When John Hersey compiled his list of the comfortable images that motivated many G.I.'s to fight ("the generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie"), he might well have added another: the image of a world of traditional heterosexual romance.
THE WAR INSPIRED A GREAT DEAL MORE THAN DREAMS OF NEW freedoms and comforts at home. Among some men and women, it inspired a vision of a world made over in the American image. Despite the warnings of Niebuhr and others of the dangers of self-righteousness, World War II greatly reinforced the vision of America as a special moral force in the world; America as a country insulated from the sins and failures and travails that affected other nations, standing somehow outside of history, protected by its own strength and virtue. "America stands at this moment at the summit of the world," Winston Churchill told the House of Commons as the war neared its end. Walter Lippmann wrote at about the same time: "What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow."
World War II did not create those beliefs. They are as old as the nation itself. But the American experience in the conflict, and the radically enhanced international stature and responsibility of the United States in the aftermath of the war, gave them new strength. Bringing American values and institutions to the world became, for some, a crusade -- as vital to the future as the war itself.
It was not just the contrast between America's democratic potential and the autocracies of Germany and Japan that shaped these expansive visions. There was also a strengthened sense that the United States -- triumphantly prosperous, anointed by victory -- had something worth sharing with all nations, a unique commitment to freedom and justice that could serve as a model for the rest of the world. Certainly that was the message of Henry R. Luce, the crusading founder and publisher of Time and Life magazines. In 1941, Luce published a small book titled "The American Century." In it, he sketched a picture of the nation's destiny that only slightly exaggerated what would come to be, by the late 1940's, a widely shared and increasingly powerful view -- a vision in which American abundance and American idealism seamlessly merged. The American century, Luce wrote, "must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills." For "we are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization -- above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity."
Luce's language may have been bombastic, but the ideas he expressed -- the belief that America had a postwar mission and special virtues worth sharing with other peoples -- penetrated deep and helped reconcile many Americans to the crusading international role that victory had thrust upon the nation.
In the glow of that victory, in the sense of old orders shattered and a new world being born, came an era of exuberant innovation, an era in which, for a time, nothing seemed more appealing than the Modern, the New. The allure of the new was manifest in the confident vision of architectural modernists, whose controversial legacy is so much a part of the postwar American landscape. It was manifest in the explosive growth of the innovative and iconoclastic American art world, which made New York in the 1940's and 1950's what Paris had been in the 19th century: the capital of international art. It was manifest in the increased stature and boldness of the American scientific community, and in the almost religious faith with which Americans welcomed technological progress.
And it was manifest in the way it excited, and then frustrated, a generation of American liberals imagining new forms of progress and social justice. For out of the war they brought, and sustained for 20 years, a commitment to a new political order. Wartime abundance, they believed, had vindicated Keynesian economics -- the alluring conviction that governments could sustain prosperity and economic growth indefinitely through enlightened use of their fiscal powers (spending and taxation) rather than by intervening directly in the affairs of capitalist institutions. Liberals also envisioned an abundant nation expanding and perfecting a generous welfare state to redeem the blighted lives of those cast aside by capitalism's imperfections. Such visions found only limited popular sympathy in the turbulent and divisive years immediately following the war. But they survived to become the basis of some of the great, and now controversial, liberal crusades of the 1960s.
In 1943, the poet and war administrator Archibald MacLeish gave a speech at Berkeley in which he expressed something of the extravagant hopes embraced by so many men and women of his time. He described the "Unimagined America," the new society the war was encouraging Americans to create:
"We have, and we know we have, the abundant means to bring our boldest dreams to pass -- to create for ourselves whatever world we have the courage to desire. We have the metal and the men to take this country down, if we please to take it down, and to build it again as we please to build it . . . to brighten the air, to clean the wind, to live as men in this Republic, free men, should be living. . . . We stand at the moment of the building of great lives, for the war's end and our victory in the war will throw that moment and the means before us."
In retrospect, of course, it is easy to see the many flaws in these expansive visions of a new postwar world: the dangerous arrogance they at times helped create, the reckless and at times disastrous experiments they helped launch, the intractable problems they helped bring to the surface and then proved unable to solve. But it is also difficult to look at today's world -- a world of diminished expectations and profound cynicism -- without finding something appealing about the brief and admittedly deceptive moment when large numbers of Americans, at the close of the most catastrophic war in human history, found it possible to believe that a brave new world was at hand.Continue reading the main story