Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (9 page)

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. Although relatively few of these conservatives were prepared to turn back the clock by abolishing such landmark legislation as Social Security, they hungered to regain political power after so many years in the minority. Theirs was a politics of revenge that led easily to excesses of Red-baiting, even during the war itself. FDR, in turn, hardly tried to conceal his contempt for conservative rivals during much of the war. When he died in April 1945, many of his opponents quietly exulted and regrouped to recapture the White House in 1948. Truman and most liberal Democrats fought back with equal fervor. Partisanship flared as intensely in the late 1940s and early 1950s as at any other time in modern United States history.

As passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947 made clear, conservatives possessed important assets in these battles. One of these was the support of resurgent business leaders. This development, too, owed much to the war, which pulled corporate leaders out of the self-doubt that possessed them following the Crash and Depression. Large corporations benefited especially, garnering the lion's share of lucrative, cost-plus defense contracts, renegotiating contracts to their advantage when the contracts went badly, gaining ownership of patents achieved with the aid of government subsidy, and buying government-owned factories for a song at the close of war. Many liberals worried about the rise in corporate power during the war, but top government officials acquiesced in it as a way of speeding up the war effort. "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."
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Stimson and others might well have pondered more fully a contemporary adage: "The hand that signs the war contract is the hand that shapes the future." 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. After the war many corporate leaders lost defense contracts. But they had amassed considerable power and prestige in the war years, and they reasserted themselves thereafter with uncommon relish, spending large sums on lobbying, campaign finance, litigation, public relations, advertising, philanthropy, and sponsorship of research in efforts to broaden their influence.

This was no corporate monolith. As always, American corporations competed vigorously with one another. Many small businessmen resented bitterly the gains of big business during the war. The National Association of Manufacturers, a leading conservative group, frequently clashed with slightly more liberal business lobbies such as the Committee for Economic Development and the United States Chamber of Commerce. Nor were business elites consistently successful in the political arena. Often divided over particular issues, they were frequently clumsy at politics, and they lost any number of battles over the years. But in most situations the leading corporate figures of the postwar era were agreed in their opposition to expansion of the New Deal.
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America, one business spokesman said in 1944, must "rid the economy of injurious or unnecessary regulation, as well as administration that is hostile or harmful," and pursue "constructive fiscal, monetary, and other policies that provide a climate in which a private enterprise system can flourish." In effect these leaders were pressing for a government that would largely do the bidding of big business. In so doing they put together what one historian has called "the largest and most systematic deployment of corporate power in the history of the United States."
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O
NE MAY STILL ASK
how these conservatively inclined groups succeeded in holding Truman, union leaders, and liberal allies to stalemate in the late 1940s. A final answer is that the economy was flourishing, thereby encouraging people to rely more on private effort than on governmentally sponsored social changes.
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The relationship of economic growth to social policy is hardly simple or predictable. Take the 1960s for an example. The vitality of the market, which flourished throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, seemed so fantastic by the early 1960s that reformers, playing on ever-greater popular expectations about the future of the economy, generated wide political support for government social, and educational programs. After all, the economic pie seemed huge, and the country seemed well able to afford a rise in social spending. Many liberals in the heady climate'of the early 1960s even imagined that governmental programs, spurring the market, would virtually eliminate poverty and discrimination.

A rather different scenario dominated the late 1940s, however. At that time economic growth was only beginning to develop, and popular expectations, while rising, were considerably less Utopian. 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. Cautiously optimistic about the future, most Americans did not think that government could—or should—intervene very far in economic matters. Heeding the rhetoric of conservative interest groups, they believed instead that the market (with only modest help from the State) would ordinarily manage on its own to promote further economic growth. Many liberals, too, lowered their sights, hoping that fiscal tinkering—adjusting spending, taxes, and interest rates—would be sufficient to fine-tune the economy and assure expansion. They assumed that tougher measures such as more progressive taxation, heightened anti-trust activity, long-range social planning, and stringent governmental regulation, would not be necessary and might even be counter-productive.
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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.
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They largely accepted a political arena that was controlled by well-established interest groups: businessmen, large commercial farmers, physicians, veterans, some unionized workers.
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The rise of "interest group liberalism," as it has been called, dominated American politics after 1945.
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Much of the time this led to turf wars between the groups and to political stalemate.

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. By 1949 these issues had done much to divert popular attention from social and economic reforms. But as early as 1946 the stalemate was already fairly clear. 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. With a buoyant economy beginning to erode memories of the Great Depression, it was not an opportune time for dramatic political change.

3
Booms

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. By then it was a boom that astonished observers. One economist, writing about the twenty-five years following World War II, put it simply by saying that this was a "quarter century of sustained growth at the highest rates in recorded history." Former Prime Minister Edward Heath of Great Britain agreed, observing that the United States at the time was enjoying "the greatest prosperity the world has ever known."
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By almost any standards of measurement the postwar economic power and affluence of the United States were indeed amazing. With 7 percent of the world's population in the late 1940s, America possessed 42 percent of the world's income and accounted for half of the world's manufacturing output. American workers produced 57 percent of the planet's steel, 43 percent of electricity, 62 percent of oil, 80 percent of automobiles. Dominating the international economy like a colossus, it had three-quarters of the world's gold supplies. Per capita income in the United States in mid-1949, at $1,450, was much higher than in the next most prosperous group of nations (Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Sweden), at between $700 and $900. Unemployment was estimated at 1.9 percent of the civilian labor force in 1945 and slightly under 4 percent from 1946 through 1948. Urban Americans at that time consumed more than 3,000 calories in food per day, including about as many fruits and vegetables per capita as forty years later. This caloric intake was around 50 percent higher than that of people in much of western Europe.
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Social stability also seemed fairly well assured for Americans in the postwar era. Thanks to strict immigration laws dating to the 1920s, few people in the 1940s worried that masses of strangers would take away jobs or disrupt the social order.
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Although youth gangs troubled some cities, most streets remained safe. Since the early 1930s, violent crime had fallen greatly in the United States. The murder rate had halved by 1945. As became clear later, this situation was abnormal, stemming in part from the fact that the United States had a relatively small cohort of young men—those most prone to crime—at the time. This in turn was the result of a trend to smaller families, which had developed earlier in the century, and of the war, which put the boys in uniform and sent millions overseas. Later, when crime rates exploded in the 1960s, people looked nostalgically to the 1940s, failing to realize the special demographic reasons that had helped to make the low rates possible. Still, it was a fact that most neighborhoods were able to control crime in the late 1940s; public disorder was only here and there a major worry.
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From the perspective of later years, it is clear that nostalgia for the late 1940s can be misplaced in other ways, for millions of people—especially blacks and Mexican-Americans—did not share in the blessings of prosperity. If there had been a "poverty rate" at that time, it would have identified at least 40 million people, 30 percent of the population, as "poor" by the standards of the era. Those standards, moreover, were harsher than in later years of higher expectations about life. In 1947 one-third of American homes had no running water, two-fifths had no flush toilets, three-fifths lacked central heat, and four-fifths were heated by coal or wood. Most people lived in rented housing. They ate considerably less beef and chicken than would later generations. Almost half worked at demanding physical tasks on farms, in factories, in mines, or in construction.
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Working-class wives typically arose at 5:00 or 6:00
A.M.
to begin a day of labor that scarcely abated until they turned in at night.

Life on the farm continued to be especially hard. Mechanization, isolation, and poverty had already driven millions of farmers and farm workers off the land in earlier decades of the twentieth century. A total of 24.4 million Americans nonetheless depended on their livelihoods from the soil in 1945, or 17.5 percent of the population. Beginning in the late 1940s, the current of people fleeing from farm to town and city swelled into a flood—one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of modern American history. By 1970 only 9.7 million people, or 4.8 percent of the overall population, worked on the land. The number of farms fell from 5.9 million at the close of World War II to 3 million twenty-five years later.
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Those farmers who remained included a small minority who enjoyed the bountiful benefits of governmentally supported large-scale commercial agriculture. Highly organized politically, these magnates of agribusiness amassed formidable power in Congress, where rural states of the South and West had ample representation, especially in the Senate. Most smaller farmers, however, struggled to make a living. And farm workers (many of them black or Hispanic) suffered from widespread exploitation: their poverty rates remained much higher than the national average. There were other languishing sectors of the American economy in these years—mining, for one—but none that suffered more in the postwar years than small-scale agriculture.

Even American families with annual earnings around the median (slightly over $3,000 in money income in 1947) lived carefully at that time. Many had vivid memories of the Depression years, when it had been easy to fall over the cliff into ruin. These people saved what money they could. Their children wore Keds, simple and inexpensive footwear. Playthings tended to be uncomplicated: yo-yos, Mr. Potato Head kits, cheap board games. Fancy toys were anything that required a battery. If the children had bikes, they were models with one speed. Few homes had more than one radio or telephone. If the family took a vacation, it was likely to be nearby, not to the Caribbean (and surely not to Europe). To want not in the early postwar years was to waste not.

Still, the dominant, increasingly celebrated trend of these years was economic progress that ultimately—in the 1950s and 1960s—shot millions of people into the ranks of the home-owning, high-consuming, ever-better-educated middle classes. Poverty, while remaining more serious than contemporaries recognized, declined steadily, falling to around 22 percent in 1959 (and to a postwar low of 11 percent in 1973). Economic expansion, greatly accelerated during the war, boosted many industries—notably aircraft, electrical and electronics firms, and chemicals. Tobacco and food-processing companies made enormous gains. Developments during the war unleashed a fantastically growing pharmaceuticals industry and hastened research that culminated in the arrival of the first digital computer in 1946 and the transistor in 1947.
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Government spending greatly assisted this expansion. Although federal outlays declined from $95.2 billion in fiscal 1945 to a postwar low of $36.5 million in 1948, they remained much higher than prewar levels—only $9.4 billion in 1939—and they then rose again, to $43.1 billion by the outset of the Korean War in 1950.
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State and local spending, meanwhile, more than doubled between 1945 and 1948, to $21.3 billion in 1948. Much of this went to support schools and road-building. And private investment boomed, especially in science and technology. The number of scientists and engineers engaged in industrial research leapt from fewer than 50,000 in 1946 to around 300,000 fifteen years later.
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Finally, the United States had a hard-working labor force. All these assets accounted for perhaps the most revealing statistic of all: gains in productivity. Output per employee increased by a remarkable 3.3 percent per year between 1947 and 1965, compared to rates of between 2 and 2.5 percent between 1900 and 1940 (and 1.4 percent between 1973 and 1977).
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Impressive as such economic statistics are, they cannot convey the broader, though admittedly hard to quantify, sense of well-being that the majority of Americans were beginning to feel by the late 1940s.
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These feelings reflected real improvements: the average American of the late 1940s earned more in real dollars, ate better, lived more comfortably, and stayed alive longer than his or her parents. Increases in earnings during the war, along with savings (totaling an enormous $140 billion in 1945) set this stage. Having money meant having the chance to buy more things, conferring on people a wonderful sense of entitlement that many had been deprived of in the 1930s and even in the early 1940s. Some younger people became so optimistic that they boldly went into debt, sure that they would do well enough to pay it off in the future. Most of their parents, especially in the working classes, found this attitude almost incomprehensible. As the boom psychology spread it may even have made people work harder, thereby benefiting the economy as a whole. In any event, the mood among the ever-larger middle classes was positive. Americans felt increasingly flush as the years passed.

Millions of people in the late 1940s also thought that the American dream was alive and well. This was not a dream of rags to riches; few sensible citizens had ever imagined that. Nor did it imagine the abolition of privileges and special distinctions: Americans at that time, as earlier, tolerated open and unapologetic rankings in schools, in the military, in job descriptions. Rather, it was defined by the belief that hard work would enable a person to rise in society and that children would do better in life than parents. The United States was indeed the land of opportunity and high expectations.
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The dream rested also on a widespread sense among white Americans that the United States did not suffer from a rigid, impermeable class structure. Some working-class people, to be sure, were keenly aware of continuing class distinctions and held an "us" versus "them" attitude characteristic of European peasant societies. Many others clung to their ethnic, working-class subcultures. Perceiving schools as dominated by "outsiders," these people were cool to the very American faith that education could or should lead to individual advancement. Work was something one did, not a way to personal "careers." Folks like these resented young people who tried to break away from the neighborhood and strike out on their own. They especially believed in sticking close to the extended family.
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But even these people were likely to believe that American society offered opportunities—acquiring property, for instance—to the person with spunk and drive.
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Many forces sustained this faith in economic opportunity, the core of the American dream: the fantastic material abundance of the country, the egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution, the high aspirations of energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, the existence (for whites) of political rights, the real possibility of getting ahead. All these forces had historically made Americans a restless, enterprising, and geographically mobile people. In the postwar years this mobility may have declined a little, mainly owing to increased home-ownership. But the United States continued to be—along with other "new immigrant" societies such as Canada and Australia—the most geographically mobile country in the world. From the 1940s to the 1970s roughly 20 percent of Americans changed residence every year.
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The dream depended finally on the sense that social mobility, too, was possible. Rags to riches made no sense, but rags to respectability did. Whether this belief represented reality depends on one's standards of measurement. Studies of twentieth-century income distribution, for instance, tend to show high levels of inequality, as measured by the percentage of income controlled by various percentiles of the income pyramid. The money income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families (and unrelated individuals) in 1947 was 19 percent of the national total; the richest 20 percent had 46 percent of income ; the lowest 20 percent had 3.5 percent. Studies of the mobility of
individuals
, however, reveal a vast amount of movement up (and down) the income scale.
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Millions of optimistic Americans, especially younger people,
thought
that they could get ahead.

These were years, too, of grander expectations about the blessings of science, technology, and expertise in general. Many scientists were certain that the harnessing of atomic energy had all sorts of beneficial peacetime possibilities, ranging from use as a cheap source of power to medical "breakthroughs." Faith in medicine and in the goodness of physicians rose dramatically among the middle classes who could afford them. The war, after all, had seen the introduction of "wonder drugs" such as streptomycin and penicillin; now it was time to conquer other dread diseases, such as polio and cancer. A few days after the bombing of Nagasaki, executives of General Motors announced a $4 million grant to Memorial Hospital in New York, to establish the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research there.
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"The automobile industry," they said, "starting from nothing has developed into one of our greatest industries. We should like to place at the disposal of the medical profession, which has done and is doing such a magnificent job, any of our particular type of research techniques which it feels can be used advantageously to help it to conquer this so-called 'incurable' disease."
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