Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (12 page)

The baby boom was in some ways cause as well as consequence of prosperity in the postwar years. The rise in births unleashed a dynamic "juvenile market," especially for producers of toys, candy, gum, records, children's clothes, washing machines, lawn and porch furniture, televisions, and all manner of household "labor-saving" devices. It helped drive the surge in suburban home-building and automobile-buying, as well as a gradual boom in school construction.
⁵⁷
Diapers alone were a $50 million business by 1957. The juvenile market peaked around that time at approximately $33 billion a year.
⁵⁸
Life
magazine in 1958 ran a cover story under a banner headline,
KIDS: BUILT-IN RECESSION CURE—HOW
4,000,000
A YEAR MAKE MILLIONS IN BUSINESS
. The story estimated that an infant was a prodigious customer, "a potential market for $800 worth of products." While in the hospital, the baby had "already rung up $450 in medical expenses." Four-year-olds represented a "backlog of business orders that will take two decades to fulfill."
⁵⁹

By that time the phrase "baby boom generation" was common. Demographers and journalists have subsequently been fascinated by it, seeing the boom as a "cutting edge" of social change, a "Goliath generation stumbling awkwardly into the future," a "pig in a python" that bulged through many decades thereafter.
⁶⁰
The phrase is in some ways fairly clumsy. 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. Most of them entered a job market that was attractive in part because of prosperity, which persisted until the early 1970s, and in part because there was a relatively small cohort of older people ahead of them. Boomers born in 1956, by contrast, entered the world of work in the mid-to late 1970s. These were recession years, made all the more traumatic for job-seekers because millions of older boomers ahead of them clogged up the employment market.

It is also clear, mainly in retrospect, that the baby boom years were hardly the untroubled years of domesticity that television shows such as "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" made them out to be. As the increase in female employment indicated, millions of married women could not afford the luxury—or endure the routine—of staying at home full-time. Millions of children, with both father and mother off at work, saw less of their parents than did the happy young boys of "Leave It to Beaver," another TV celebration of postwar domestic life. Families, moreover, continued to encounter not only the unavoidable, day-to-day stresses that have characterized all households throughout history but also the strains that accompanied the scrambling quest for security, advancement, and consumption in the postwar age. Meanwhile, the sexual revolution was quietly but steadily advancing, inciting innumerable conflicts between young people and between them and their parents. By the 1950s newspapers and magazines were carrying headlines about rising juvenile delinquency, "peer group pressures," and even a "youth culture" (though consisting mostly at that time of children born
before
1946) that threatened to reject the older generation. Many of these stories rested on dubious and often exaggerated generalizations; rates of juvenile delinquency, for instance, were not on the rise. But some of the stories, such as many of those concerning sexual behavior, did not. The articles suggested trends that became obvious when the baby boomers came of age in the 1960s: family life in the 1940s and 1950s was considerably more complicated and less idyllic than nostalgia-mongers have cared to admit.
⁶¹

Still, these problems became widely appreciated only later. In the late 1940s the baby boom excited contemporaries. Resting in part on postwar affluence, it promoted still greater prosperity and fed the huge rise of suburbia. And the divorce rate did decline, suggesting to many optimists that the durable two-parent family with children was a norm that would become stronger than ever. Although it later became clear that these developments were an anomalous interlude amid more lasting historical social trends that resumed in the 1960s (later marriages, lower birth rates, smaller families, ever-higher divorce rates), that was far from obvious before 1950, or even 1960. On the contrary, the baby boom symbolized a broader "boom" mentality of many younger Americans, especially whites and the ever-larger numbers of people moving upward into the middle classes. They were developing expectations that grew grander and grander over time.

4
Grand Expectations About the World

World War II did more than usher in unparalleled prosperity for the United States. It transformed America's foreign relations. The war devastated the Axis nations, which took years to recover. It also savaged America's allies, including the Soviet Union, which lost an estimated 25 million people during six years of fighting. Alone of the world's great powers the United States emerged immeasurably stronger, both absolutely and relatively, from the carnage. In a new balance of power it was a colossus on the international stage.

Few Americans at the end of the war fully understood how vast a role the United States would play on this stage in the future. Top policymakers at first did not talk much about a
Pax Americana
, about "worldwide Communist expansion," or even about the "American Century" that Henry Luce had anticipated in 1941. But it was obvious that advances in air power, rocketry, and atomic weapons ended America's history of relatively free security, and that the United States might have to fill at least part of the postwar power vacuum. Most political leaders recognized that they lived on an interconnected planet, in which a spark in one corner of the world could ignite explosions in many other corners. America, Secretary of War Stimson observed, could "never again be an island to itself. No private program and no public policy, in any sector of our national life, can now escape from the compelling fact that if it is not framed with reference to the world, it is framed with perfect futility."
¹

After 1945 this recognition dominated official American approaches to the world. But it was a recognition that arrived somewhat rudely forced on a reluctant nation by the dramatic events of the era. The change was indeed rapid. As late as 1938 Romania had supported a larger army than did the United States. Until the war America had only a few cryptographers and no national intelligence service.
²
By 1945 leaders in the realm of foreign policy knew, like Stimson, that major changes were in store and that the national interests of the United States might expand almost immeasurably. But in 1945 they were unsure what these interests were or how to defend them.

Then and in later years these leaders sometimes felt insecure. That may seem odd, given America's awesomely preponderant power after the war. Indeed, policy-makers did not fear military attack in the late 1940s. After all, no nation then had the airplanes to rain bombs on the continental United States, and none yet had the Bomb. But in an age of formidable military and technological prowess these things could change quickly. And
political
pressures, especially from the Soviet Union, increasingly unsettled the nerves of high officials in the West.

In 1945 American leaders worried especially about the will of the citizenry to support major involvement of the country in overseas controversies. As it turned out, public opinion shifted decisively toward acceptance of substantial American engagement with the rest of the world: the people, following their leaders, developed large expectations about the role of American foreign policy. But this shift in opinion was hard to predict before 1947, and the unease of top officials pervaded the conduct of American foreign relations at the time.
³

Worries about the Soviet Union prompted by far the greatest unease, not only in the United States but also among America's Western allies. Even before the end of the war, the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world's number two power, had grown tense. By early 1946 these tensions had badly strained Soviet-American relations, and by 1947 the Cold War, as it was then called, had arrived—to dominate international politics for more than forty years. Diplomats of both nations struggled to steer a safe course through the storms unleashed by the war, but they often lacked the charts—or even the compass—to guide them reliably. Insecure, often confused, they frequently misperceived the course of the other side. Several times they almost collided. Given the megatons of weaponry that they ultimately overloaded themselves with, it is amazing that they did not destroy each other, in the process raining catastrophe on the rest of the world.
⁴

Notwithstanding these feelings of insecurity, which were especially obvious in the immediate aftermath of the war, the leaders of America's postwar foreign policy—a group that came to be known as the Establishment—developed a self-confidence that occasionally bordered on self-righteousness. Their rising certitude rested on the belief that the Soviet Union was a dangerous foe, that the United States had large interests in the world, and that it must assert these interests strongly; "appeasement" led inevitably to disgrace and defeat. Leaders of the Establishment did not always define these interests clearly: where, indeed, must the United States risk war? But they were confident that America possessed the economic and military resources to outlast and ultimately to overcome a host of potential enemies. In their approach to international relations they developed very grand expectations that they managed to fashion into official American policy.

T
O SAY THAT THE
C
OLD
W
AR
stemmed in part from international insecurities is to make the obvious point that both sides followed nervous, sometimes wrong-headed courses in the postwar years. Most American political leaders in the late 1940s, however, would have hotly rejected such a non-judgmental view of the Cold War. So, too, have many among the host of scholars who have pored over the history of the early Cold War years. Until the early 1960s most American writers tended to blame the Soviets. Then, under the influence of frightening events such as the missile crisis over Cuba in 1962, and the Vietnam War, revisionists sharply challenged this patriotic view, either assigning blame to both sides or finding the United States the more "guilty" of the two.
⁵
"Post-revisionists" broadened the scope of inquiry and tried to strike a balance between polar interpretations. Although the debates seemed relatively tame by the 1990s—when the Cold War at last subsided—they were by no means dead or irrelevant, and they may be briefly summarized here.
⁶

Those who blame the Soviet Union for the Cold War make several assertions. Josef Stalin, they note, did much to bring on World War II when he signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939. The two nations followed by cynically carving up Poland. The Soviet Union also seized the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and parts of Finland and Romania as well. Critics of Stalin emphasize correctly that he was not only a ruthless dictator but also in many ways a barbarian. Deeply suspicious of rivals for power, he purged associates, executing some of them in the late 1930s after widely publicized show trials. He put in place the infamous Gulag Archipelago, a system of slave labor camps that imprisoned all manner of people thought to be dangerous to his regime.
⁷

Stalin's behavior during the war also appalled his critics. When German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they found in the Katyn Forest the bodies of thousands of Polish officers. They had been murdered under orders from Stalin. Four years later, as rapidly driving Russian troops stormed to the edge of Warsaw, Polish underground forces arose in open rebellion against the Nazis. Stalin, however, ordered his tanks to remain on the outskirts. The Germans then ruthlessly crushed the uprising. The full extent of Stalin's crimes was not widely recognized in 1945, but enough was known for informed people to stamp Stalin as a cruel and often merciless tyrant.

The war over, Stalin's critics say, he remained true to form. Although apparently agreeing at the Yalta conference in early 1945 to the holding of free elections in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe—he signed a Declaration on Liberated Europe—he clamped down on democratic elements in much of the region. His repression of Poland, over which World War II had begun in 1939, outraged many people, including the millions of Polish-Americans with friends and relatives in the old country. Seeking to stamp out ethnic differences in the Soviet Union, Stalin forced from their homes hundreds of thousands of non-Russian people. He tried to close off Soviet borders, as if fearing that any contact with the outside world would undermine his regime. Stalin's frightening behavior, some diplomats speculated, was consistent with a diagnosis of clinical paranoia.
⁸

Western diplomats worried especially about Stalin's foreign policies. He seemed determined not only to fasten iron control on eastern Europe, including the Soviet zone of eastern Germany, but also to widen Soviet influence in Manchuria, Iran, Turkey, and the Dardanelles. Apparently distrusting everyone, he displayed little interest in diplomacy—that is, in the give-and-take of negotiation. How could any other nation work with such a man? Averell Harriman, America's ambassador to the Soviet Union, sounded an alarm in 1944. "Unless we take issue with the present policy," he wrote in September, "there is every indication that the Soviet Union will become a world bully wherever their interests are involved." When Stalin failed to permit free elections in Poland and Romania, he tested the considerable patience of Roosevelt, who had tried hard to accommodate his wartime ally. "Averell is right," FDR complained three weeks before his death in April 1945. "We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta."
⁹
At the same time, however, FDR refused to break with Stalin: it remains impossible to know what he would have done about the Soviet Union had he lived.

Why Stalin acted as he did remains a source of debate among historians and other Kremlinologists. Some think his hostility to the West stemmed primarily from the Marxist-Leninist ideology that he and fellow Soviet leaders shared. This held that history moved inexorably toward the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of Communism throughout the world. Such a view permitted the possibility of transitory peaceful coexistence with capitalistic powers; after all, the crash of capitalism was part of the design of history. Stalin, therefore, did not welcome the idea of war with a nation such as the United States. But Communists did not believe in a passive policy that would enshrine the status quo. History, they thought, could—must—be moved along, and the Soviet Union, as the leading force in the making of this history, must compete and stay ahead of rivals. Until the late 1970s, long after Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet leaders refused to accept the notion of military parity with the United States.
¹⁰

Western critics in the mid-1940s pointed to Stalin's military policies as evidence of his driven need to compete. Having built the world's biggest army in his efforts to stop Hitler, Stalin maintained much of it after the war was over. Estimates placed its size at 3 million men. The Soviets, indeed, had an enormous manpower advantage over Western occupation forces in Europe during the postwar years. Whenever they wanted to, alarmists said, Communists could overrun the Continent. At the same time Stalin made sure that the West knew of his highest military priority: to build up Soviet offensive capabilities, especially nuclear weapons, submarines, and long-range (3,000-mile) bombers. These were modeled on the American B-29, three of which had crashed in the Soviet Union following wartime raids on Japan.
¹¹
Nothing that Stalin did, fearful Americans came to think, more clearly demonstrated the unrelentingly aggressive thrust of Communism, including the use of military power to promote worldwide revolution.

Other critics of Stalin doubt, probably correctly, that ideological considerations alone do much to explain Stalin's behavior in the late 1940s. They think the Soviets mainly pursued imperial policies similar to those of the tsars.
¹²
Stalin, they say, did not seek worldwide revolution so much as control of adjacent areas that posed a threat to Russian national security. Chief among these, of course, were eastern Europe, Iran, and Turkey, all of which had long feared Russia. Revisionists who seek to understand Stalin's own concerns also emphasize that he was highly insecure, that Soviet pressure on adjoining nations was largely defensive in nature. All states, after all, yearn to protect themselves against potentially hostile neighbors and to fill power vacuums into which enemies might tread. Stalin's critics reply that he nonetheless went about his business in an especially uncompromising and provocative way. George Kennan, a leading diplomatic expert on the Soviets, explained in July 1946, "Security is probably their [the Soviets'] basic motive, but they are so anxious and suspicious about it that the objective results are much the same as if the motive were aggression, indefinite expansion. They evidently seek to weaken all centers of power they cannot dominate, in order to reduce the danger from any possible rival."
¹³

Stalin's critics, then and later, rest their case finally on the fact that he was a powerful, dour, often brutal dictator. The very fact of this dictatorship deeply offended Americans, who cherished their freedoms, who sympathized with the oppressed masses of eastern Europe, and who earnestly hoped to promote the spread of democracy. "Totalitarian" states, they believed, habitually relied on force to get their way in world affairs. "It is not Communism but Totalitarianism which is the potential threat,"
New York Times
publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger said. "Only people who have a Bill of Rights are not the potential enemies of other people." President Truman agreed, noting privately in November 1946, "Really there is no difference between the government which Mr. Molotov represents and the one the Czar represented—or the one Hitler spoke for."
¹⁴