ALL THOUGHTS AND THINGS WERE SPLIT
The Cold War
NOTHING LIKE THE GRAND REVIEW WAS POSSIBLE AT THE conclusion of the Second World War. There could not have been a similarly concentrated gathering-in of the nation’s forces after a conflict that had literally encompassed the globe, and whose conclusion found the U.S. military and its allies present in almost every corner of the planet. But that did not stop a multitude of exuberant celebrations from erupting in the streets everywhere across the American continent, often giddy and impromptu affairs – snake dancing in Salt Lake City, parades of honking autos in Indianapolis, riotous sailors in San Francisco, leather-lunged crowds in New York’s Times Square, and everywhere an epidemic of public kisses between happy friends and strangers alike.
Happiest of all were the American soldiers and sailors, relieved to know that they would not have to put their lives on the line in an invasion of Japan. They whooped for joy, fired colored flares into the air, careened their wildly honking jeeps through the streets of Manila, and broke out their special caches of whiskey, reserved for the occasion. The country, in the words of Life magazine, “went on the biggest spree in American history,” as it was released at last, or so it seemed, from the anxieties and deprivations of the war years.
Not only the war years, but the demoralizing shadow of the Depression years too. It had been sixteen long years since the prosperity of the 1920s had come tumbling down, and after many false starts and deferred hopes, it seemed that at last happy days might really be here again. Thanks to the massive economic stimulus of ramped-up wartime military spending – federal expenditures increased 1,000 percent between 1939 and 1945, resulting in a then-whopping $250 million national debt – the American industrial economy seemed to have recovered its footing. There would of course be anxieties looking forward, just as there had been in 1918 and 1919, about the problems of postwar demobilization; and this demobilization would be much, much larger. Would the returning soldiers and sailors be able to find jobs and housing? Would there be a wave of strikes and urban riots? Would the removal of price controls lead to inflation and loss of consumer purchasing power? And the greatest fear of all: would the return of the nation to a peacetime footing mean an end to the fleeting economic recovery that the war years had brought, and a return to depressed conditions of the 1930s?
Those concerns could be set aside for the time being, though, to savor the moment of victory. What a stirring spectacle it would be for the American servicemen packed onto ships returning from Europe, as they passed through the narrows and gradually came into sight of the Manhattan skyline! Many of them had only days before walked the rubble-strewn streets of war-torn Berlin and Frankfurt and observed the charred ruins of venerable old churches and public buildings in those once beautiful cities. Now they saw a contrasting vision unfolding before them. As Jan Morris has written, “Untouched by the war the men had left behind them,” the great architectural jumble of Manhattan “stood there metal-clad, steel-ribbed, glass-shrouded, colossal and romantic – everything that America seemed to represent in a world of loss and ruin.” The lofty, tapering silhouette of the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building, towered in solitary splendor over all the lesser buildings around it, much as a resurgent United States stood tall and self-confident amid the wrecked and dispirited nations of Europe and Asia, allies and enemies alike.
Many of the fears about demobilization were borne out in the short term. There was a sharp but brief postwar recession. There were serious labor and housing shortages; there were major strikes in the auto, steel, and coal industries; there was inflation and other sources of distress and dislocation. But these concerns proved fleeting, and when they came and went, it became clear that a wholesale return to the stagnant conditions of the Depression was simply not in the cards. America had made it through its hard times and was coming out the other side.
Americans had accumulated considerable savings during the commodity-poor war years; incomes rose during the war, and it was not hard to save money when there were so few consumer goods available anyway. But now Americans were ready to spend, and the revived economy would provide the means for them to do so. The United States was embarked on the path of a new prosperity and would soon be enjoying the highest standard of living of any society in history to that point. “The Great American Boom is on,” predicted the confident editors of Fortune magazine, writing in 1946. And what a boom it would turn out to be.
In the quarter-century between the end of the war and the year 1970, GNP more than doubled, from $355 billion in 1945 to $723 billion in 1970, while per capita income before taxes increased from $1,870 to $3,050 (all quantities measured in steady 1958 dollars). One element in this rising postwar prosperity was continued government spending at relatively high rates, particularly in the areas of defense and military research. But even more important was the flood of consumer spending, flowing out of the demand for housing, household appliances, automobiles – almost anything for which wartime restrictions had created a strong pent-up need. In addition, new inventions, such as televisions, washing and drying machines, lawnmowers, deep freezers, high-fidelity stereos, and countless other products oriented toward home use for individual consumers, whetted the public appetite.
The auto industry in particular continued to be a key element moving multiple sectors of the economy, as eight million new cars per year (as of 1970) were being manufactured, eight times the number produced during the war, a pace of production that consumed one-fifth of the nation’s steel and two-thirds of its rubber and lead. Highway construction followed auto manufacturing, and in 1947, Congress authorized the construction of 37,000 miles of highways; then, in 1956, the nation launched into the construction of the 42,500-mile interstate highway system, a network of limited-access high-speed highways that would be the largest road construction project in American history and transform the nation’s landscape, making long-distance automobile travel a staple of American transportation and commerce.
Along with the mobility supplied by the automobile, and the highway capacity to make automotive travel easy and efficient, there soon came an explosion of growth in brand-new housing springing up in suburban areas – so much growth that, by 1970, ten million more Americans lived in suburbs than lived in conventional central cities. Entrepreneurs like the developer William Levitt created whole new communities – Levittowns – featuring small, highly affordable new homes with lawns and other modest amenities designed for the young families of returning veterans and other young Americans just beginning to form families and take their place in the workforce. As remarkable a change in the national geography as suburbanization represented, it was a continuation of the same forces that had transformed the walking cities of antebellum America into the more segmented cities of the early twentieth century, a transformation that had been made possible mainly by the development of the streetcar. In the postwar years, a similar transformation was being wrought by the automobile and the highway transportation system coming along with it, which greatly expanded the reach of suburbanization and placed the possibility of homeownership within the reach even of people of relatively modest means.
The twelve million returning veterans received an additional form of support from their federal government that would ease their return to civilian life. The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights (GI, or “government issue,” being a slang term for military personnel), provided veterans with an impressive array of benefits, including the opportunity to attend college or job-training school at the government’s expense, an opportunity that some eight million of them took. The result was an almost overwhelming boom in college enrollments, which swelled from 160,000 graduates in prewar America to 500,000 in 1950 and helped encourage the view that a college education, rather than being an option for the upper classes, was a source of opportunity that could be open to all Americans. The GI Bill also provided low-cost mortgage loans to veterans, which enabled about five million of them to buy houses, even if they were too financially strapped to afford a down payment.
All these developments gave support to a surge in new family formation, often referred to as the “baby boom” of the postwar years. The reasons for that boom, though, were not only material but also psychological. During the economic uncertainties during the Depression years of the 1930s, and the upheaval of the war years in the 1940s, a great many young people understandably decided to hold off from parenthood, even delay marriage, since the time did not seem propitious and the future did not look bright. How was one to justify bringing children into such a troubled world? But things now looked different, with the exuberant sense of possibility emerging in the postwar years. Now such couples felt confidence in the future and decided that the moment was right for making up for lost time. The result was phenomenal. Between the end of the war and the year 1960, the American population increased by 30 percent, an increase almost entirely due to internal growth, that is, the baby boom.
Yet all was not as well as it seemed. This happiness, this joy, this sense of relief, had to coexist with terrible anxieties that were not easily dispelled and perils that could not be ignored.
In the first place, there was the fact that the development and use of the atomic bomb seemed to have opened a new chapter in human history. As James Agee wrote in Time on August 20, just two weeks after the Hiroshima bomb had been dropped, and six days after peace terms had been reached, the bomb itself was “an event so … enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance”:
With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age in which all thoughts and things were split – and far from controlled…. The power of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite.
Agee, and many others, feared that, as in the story of Frankenstein’s monster, or the sorcerer’s apprentice, a force had been let loose in the world that human ingenuity could not control and that would give added strength to the evil impulses to which humanity was so clearly susceptible.
The returning GIs, who were grateful that the bomb had saved their lives, were less likely to see the bomb in quite the way Agee did. But many of them would return from the great triumph with split thoughts of their own. Lauded as heroes, they also faced immense personal and financial challenges, disintegrating marriages, exploding family expenses, and what then was called “shell shock” but today would be called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that rendered them nervous, bitter, or plagued by nightmares and other difficulties. Audie Murphy, despite being one of the country’s most celebrated and decorated combat heroes, and a celebrated movie actor as well, returned from the war plagued with nightmares and depression and felt compelled to sleep with a loaded gun under his pillow.
His case was unusual, but a great many of the returning GIs had trouble readjusting to a prosperous and well-functioning country that seemed dramatically different from the war-torn world that they had just experienced – a country that, in fact, seemed almost to have benefited from the war more than it had been damaged. It all seemed a bit unreal. Moving from the moral chaos and mayhem of modern warfare into the smooth and orderly life of, say, a large business corporation in peacetime could be utterly disorienting, a change dramatic enough to give one vertigo.
In one of the most famous books of the 1950s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), author Sloan Wilson vividly described the postwar life of his main character, Tom Rath, a veteran of the European theater who had returned to a white-collar job and a socially ambitious wife. Rath was overwhelmed with the sense that he lived in
a disconnected world, a lunatic world, where what is true now was not true then; where Thou Shalt Not Kill and the fact that one has killed a great many men mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for now is the time to raise legitimate children, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one’s wife, and admire one’s boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as … a man in a gray flannel suit.
Tom had killed seventeen men in the Italian campaign and could not forget having done so. Nor could he forget that he had lived for a time with an Italian girl named Maria and had left her behind, pregnant with his child. But how could the people who had not been in such a chaotic place possibly understand the experiences of those who had? How could he even talk to them? How could he assimilate in his own mind what he had experienced over there and incorporate it into the life he was now living over here? In Wilson’s novel, Rath’s gray flannel suit became a symbol of the cloak of denial behind which the postwar world went on with its routines and its work.
But the single most compelling reason for postwar split-mindedness was the fact that, just as the war against Germany and Japan was concluding successfully, and the champagne corks were popping – and just as fifty nations who had joined in opposing the Axis powers met in San Francisco, on April 25, 1945, to draw up the Charter of the United Nations, the world’s hope for future peace – the victorious alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union was falling apart, with wartime suspicions being replaced by open hostility and by the genuine possibility of a serious military confrontation between the two most powerful nations in the postwar world. The Cold War, as it became known, would be especially frightening, because, thanks to the existence of nuclear weapons, it offered the possibility of a war between the former allies with destructive consequences too awful to contemplate.
So what the postwar era provided was a confusing mixture of the best of times and the worst of times: the best of times, with a surging economy accompanying high levels of domestic optimism, with the worst of times, in which even the winning of an unprecedented victory over the Axis powers seemed to offer no end to the nation’s anxieties and obligations. In fact, the flow of events in the postwar period seemed to be ramping up those anxieties and obligations even further. One historian has called the state of affairs in postwar America a “troubled feast”: an awkward and paradoxical term that nevertheless neatly captured the strange juxtaposition of promise and peril that ran through these years.
Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded to the presidency after FDR’s death, found himself plunged abruptly into the awesome task of leading the nation through one of the most challenging times in its history. “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now,” he confessed to reporters shortly after assuming office. “When they told me yesterday” about FDR’s death, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” Truman had been kept out of the major decisions of the administration during his short tenure as vice president, and now he would have to preside over some of the biggest and most consequential decisions ever made by an American president, as the United States tried to come to terms with its expanded role in the world – and the global ambitions of its determined ideological foe.
A small, bespectacled, and undistinguished-looking country boy who had been born and raised on his family’s farm near Independence, Missouri, Harry Truman could not have offered a more striking contrast to the urbane, well-born, and Harvard-educated FDR. A product of an ordinary midwestern public high school, Truman did not go on to seek a college degree but instead kicked around at a variety of jobs, first as a timekeeper with the Santa Fe Railroad and later taking clerical jobs with banks and newspapers. It was not until the time of the First World War, when he joined the army and eventually ended up serving with distinction as an artillery officer with the AEF in Europe, that Truman discovered that he had a knack for leadership.
After returning from the war, and encountering failure in trying to run a men’s clothing store, he turned to a career in politics, gradually working his way up the political ladder the hard way, without any family wealth or connections to fall back on. He attached himself to the powerful and unscrupulous Kansas City political boss T. J. Pendergast and parlayed a series of successes, beginning with a county judgeship, into election in 1934 to the U.S. Senate. Although immediately branded by his foes with the disparaging name “Senator from Pendergast,” a connection that hurt him in running for reelection in 1940, particularly after Pendergast was imprisoned for income tax evasion, Truman was eventually able to transcend his political origins and outgrow any lingering image as a “political hack.”
In particular, his dedicated work chairing a bipartisan Senate special committee, popularly known as the Truman Committee, with the task of investigating waste and fraud in military spending, brought him to the respectful attention of the nation, and of Roosevelt, who began to think of him as a possible fourth-term running mate. Mindful of the public suspicions aroused by the Nye Committee’s report on World War I munitions profiteering, Truman doggedly sought out instances of corruption. Beginning with Fort Leonard Wood in his home state of Missouri, he drove his personal car (a modest Dodge) to military installations around the country, ten thousand miles of travel, to uncover cases of millions of government dollars going to well-connected military contractors under lucrative cost-plus contracts, without procedures to ensure the proper quality of the goods delivered.
This kind of dauntless, untiring dedication captured the public’s emerging image of Harry Truman: a simple, unpretentious midwestern man, blunt, down to earth, incredibly hardworking, decisive, and thoroughly honest, not a smooth operator but a gallant and feisty defender of the interests of the common people and the little guy. If FDR had been formed in the well-pedigreed political tradition of Jefferson and Wilson, Truman was a product of the great unpedigreed tradition of Jackson and Lincoln, both of them uncommon common men in the American mold who rose to the presidency from unprepossessing beginnings, relying on audacity, ambition, talent, and sheer grit to make it to the top, but never forgetting the roots from which they had sprung.
Nevertheless, on the home-front side of the job, Truman would find the presidency very tough going. He was an enthusiastic New Dealer when it came to domestic affairs and in fact hoped to extend the New Deal into questions of national health insurance and ensuring full employment. But the Democrats had been in power for more than a decade; voters had had a bellyful of them and were now ready for a change. In the midterm elections of 1946, the Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress – their slogan was “Had Enough? Vote Republican!” – and quickly put a stop to most of Truman’s ambitious domestic program. Instead, the Republicans overrode a Truman veto to pass the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act, a significant revision of the Wagner Act of 1935 designed to pare back the power of labor unions by a number of measures, such as outlawing the “closed shop” (union membership as a precondition of any employee being hired), permitting states to pass “right to work” laws outlawing mandatory union membership, and various measures designed to inhibit unions’ ability to strike and prevent the infiltration of labor unions by Communists and other radicals.
But the truly consequential work facing Truman was in the area of foreign relations, in discerning the American role in restoring a shattered world, as well as negotiating the minefield of postwar relations with the Soviet Union. The conditions with which he would have to deal had extremely complex origins, the needs were great, and his room to maneuver was often very constricted.
The three Allies who won the Second World War together, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, were an unlikely and strange group, held together only by a shared opposition to the Axis powers and already showing signs of discord well before the end of the war. In point of fact, American relations with the Soviet Union had never been good, going back to the Revolution of 1917 establishing a Communist regime in Russia. The Soviet Union was viewed as a standing ideological threat to capitalist countries, and it was not until 1933 that the United States even was willing to grant it diplomatic recognition.
The events of 1941, with Hitler’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, changed matters tactically, but they did not produce an atmosphere of trust or mutual support, only a temporary liaison of convenience. In spring 1945, as the Red Army began to occupy large portions of Eastern Europe, the Soviets began installing puppet governments in those countries, in essence establishing the basis for a Soviet empire. Such actions were flagrant violations of the terms of the agreement that had been reached between the Allies at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, in which the Big Three agreed that, apart from a portion of Poland ceded to the Soviets, they would sponsor free elections, democratic governance, and safeguards for fundamental liberties in all the rest of Europe. The Soviets were openly disregarding that commitment.
By March 5, 1946, not even ten months after the conclusion of the war in Europe, Winston Churchill was issuing this resonant warning to an American audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech was a clear sign that a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West, particularly the United States, was now under way.
The reasons for our conflicts with the Soviets have always been a source of controversy, but a few obvious points can be made. First, it is important to recall that the Soviets had strong grievances against the Allies. It was they who had borne the brunt of the battle and the bulk of the casualties in the fight against Hitler, during years in which Churchill and Roosevelt had repeatedly put off Stalin’s demand for a decisive invasion from the West. Stalin believed that such an invasion would establish a second front that could take some of the heat off the East and spread the sacrifices of the war effort more equitably. This was not unreasonable. By some estimates, as many as half of all deaths in the Second World War were of Soviet combatants and civilians. For all Stalin’s tendency toward deviousness and bad faith, some acknowledgment has to be made of the enormous extent of those concerns. It also needs to be recognized that, given Russia’s history of suffering invasions from the West, most recently at the hands of Adolf Hitler, the Soviet desire for a protective buffer zone to the West was understandable.
But it is an entirely different matter to excuse the unmistakable pattern of Soviet deceptions, manipulations, and broken promises as, one by one, between 1946 and 1948, Soviet-controlled Communist regimes came to power in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. The expansion did not end with the creation of these “satellites.” The four-way division of Germany prescribed at Yalta was to be temporary, but no sooner did the Americans turn the eastern zone of Germany over to the Soviet occupation than the Soviets began the process of erecting yet another Communist satellite state, the German Democratic Republic, meant to govern the zone permanently. The United States wanted to see a reunited Germany that would be economically strong; the Soviets, on the contrary, wanted to see a permanently divided Germany, to ensure a permanently weakened Germany.
Nor was this all. The Soviets seemed to be increasingly expansion minded, reflecting both Marxist–Leninist ideology and the conditions of the times. Postwar Europe was in a highly vulnerable economic and political state, with fragile regimes tottering on the edge of dissolution, making them prime targets of opportunity. The expansion of Soviet influence into the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and even western Europe itself was a looming possibility. The Soviets challenged Turkey to allow their shipping to pass at will through the Turkish Straits connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, a direct affront to Turkish sovereignty that could easily escalate into military conflict. In Greece, a Communist insurgency threatened to overthrow the Greek monarchy, which had lost the protection of a war-weakened British Empire. If either of these two countries fell under Soviet influence, the other would soon follow, and the Soviets would then be able to control the eastern Mediterranean and threaten the Suez Canal, the lifeline to Middle Eastern oil.
In the meantime, George F. Kennan, an American diplomat posted at the American embassy in Moscow, was formulating a strategic doctrine by which the United States could understand and respond to the increasingly alarming Soviet threat. An elegant writer and subtle analyst, Kennan was able to draw not only on his extensive knowledge of Russian history and Soviet institutions but also on his understanding of the psychological makeup of the Soviet regime. He found it permeated with internal instability and insecurity, which in turn helped to fuel a ceaseless drive toward expansion, even as it tended to make for a certain cautiousness in pursuing those ends.
Kennan concluded that the best way for the United States to respond to the Soviet threat would be by occupying a well-considered middle ground. It should not try to appease the Soviets by declining to resist them, nor should it attempt aggressively to roll back the Soviets’ areas of established domination and risk cataclysmic war. Instead, Kennan recommended a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” one that would have to subordinate the desire for visible victory but could do so in full confidence that the Soviet system “bears within it the seeds of its own decay, and that the sprouting of those seeds is well advanced.”
This outlook corresponded roughly with the emerging outlook of President Truman and his advisors. On March 12, 1947, Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress and, after making a powerful and moving case for the perilousness of the Greek situation and the depth of the Greeks’ need for assistance, requested a $400 million economic-aid package for Greece and Turkey. The action represented a fairly pure expression of the containment ideal. Aware of the precedent being set, Truman carefully set forward the principles by which the provision of such aid would be guided in the future:
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political process
The economic vulnerabilities of the postwar world were at the heart of its perils. “The seeds of totalitarian regimes,” he argued, “are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive.”
The reaction to Truman’s speech was generally positive, although there were criticisms. The influential journalist Walter Lippmann noted that the policy committed the country to a struggle that had no tangible object, only the vague hope that Soviet power would implode over time. Kennan himself would, years later, complain that Truman extended the containment doctrine much further and more aggressively than he had intended; others complained that it was too passive, too willing to accept the status quo, and that a “rollback” of Communist rule was the only acceptable response.
Yet what Truman and his advisors saw all over Europe was a critical situation, in which economic problems loomed even larger than military ones. Industrial production was nil, transportation systems were at a standstill, food production was grossly inadequate, coal shortages made many homes un inhabitable, and weather conditions of drought and extreme cold greatly exacerbated all these problems. In both Italy and France, the Communist Party was making serious inroads in the hearts and minds of a discouraged, desperate electorate. It was possible to imagine Soviet-aligned Communists coming to power through the ballot box in those countries. Only the United States, Truman stated in his address, could supply the help that could make a difference.
Following along these same lines, General George Marshall, now Truman’s secretary of state, used his Harvard University commencement address in June 1947 to outline an ambitious plan for the recovery and rebuilding of Europe. The worst enemy, he said, was not any particular ideology but rather “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” The goal of postwar American policy should be “the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” The Marshall Plan, as it came to be known, would extend aid to all European countries, including the Soviet Union. In the end, the Soviets would decline to participate, labeling the plan an “imperialist” scheme, and would force their satellite states to decline as well.
In fact, Stalin had no desire to see the free economies of Europe recover their strength. In the end, however, they did, and with remarkable speed. How much of this was due to the Marshall Plan and how much was due to general economic recovery is impossible to say. But a total of some $13 billion in American dollars was infused into the European economy, and it seemed to have just the effects that Truman and Marshall hoped it would. It strengthened the economies of the Western European powers so that they would not be vulnerable to seeing their democratic institutions subverted. It also helped the United States, both by furthering its foreign-policy objectives in Europe and also by creating markets for American exported goods. It thus was both a highly generous act and a very self-interested one on the part of the United States.
It did nothing, however, to bridge the chasm that had opened up between the United States and the Soviet Union. That relationship only worsened. In 1948, when the three non-Soviet sectors of occupied Germany announced plans to unite as “West Germany,” the Soviets retaliated by blocking land access to Allied-occupied West Berlin, which was located in the heart of Soviet-dominated East Germany, hoping either to force a reversal of the Western German unification or to force the Western powers to relinquish control over West Berlin. Truman hung tough, though, and, instead of initiating armed conflict, chose to resupply West Berlin by a massive airlift, flying in thirteen thousand tons a day of food, medical supplies, coal, and other necessary items. The blockade, and the airlift, continued until May 12, 1949, when the Soviets finally lifted the blockade. Containment had triumphed.
Meanwhile, the decline in Allied–Soviet relations had given rise to a formal military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), created in April 1949 and uniting twelve nations, including the United States and Canada, in a mutual-defense pact. In signing the NATO treaty, the signatory parties were agreeing to regard an attack on any one of its members as equivalent to an attack upon itself, and to respond accordingly. Truman appointed General Dwight Eisenhower as NATO’s first supreme commander and stationed American troops in various parts of Western Europe as protection against possible Soviet invasion. For the United States, such a commitment was a striking departure from the tradition founded by George Washington’s Farewell Address, which recommended against any permanent alliances for the United States. But there was near-universal agreement that such a mutual-defense commitment was needed, and NATO went on to become one of the most successful military alliances in history, an effective and durable check against Soviet aggression and a central institution for the West’s policy of containment.
Finally, one should mention yet another event in Truman’s action-packed first term as president: his decisive role in the creation of the modern state of Israel. The Jewish people of the world had for centuries been compelled to exist in diaspora, a term for scattering or dispersion, meaning that wherever they lived, they existed as minorities, at the mercy of the majority culture, since they lacked a geographical country of their own. The Zionist movement begun in nineteenth-century Europe set out to rectify this situation and sought the eventual achievement of a national homeland for the Jewish people.
Many Zionists began to migrate to Palestine, which they revered as the biblical Holy Land, and they found a haven there from the anti-Semitic pogroms and persecutions of Europe and Russia. Palestine had been under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, who were Sunni Muslims, until the First World War, but after the war ended and the Ottoman Empire disappeared, the League of Nations made Palestine a British mandate. The British had long been officially sympathetic to the Zionist idea, and with their encouragement, and the strong support of American Jews and much of the international Jewish community, Zionists began to envision Palestine as the destined location for a modern Jewish state.
The matter passed to the fledgling United Nations as successor to the League, and it tried in late 1947 to put forward an understanding that would partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and leave Jerusalem under an international trusteeship. But that proposition encountered strong Arab resistance, and matters were left stalemated as fighting broke out between Arab and Jewish factions. Finally, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, declared the independence of Israel. Eleven minutes later, Truman announced U.S. recognition of the new state of Israel. He had strongly supported such a move for many years and knew in advance what Ben-Gurion planned to do, and he wanted the United States to be the first nation in the world to grant official diplomatic recognition to the new nation of Israel.
Most of Truman’s aides opposed the move, fearing that it would damage American national interests by seeming to disparage the concerns of Arab oil states. Indeed, Israel immediately found itself at war with its neighboring Arab states, and continued to be for many of the subsequent years. But Truman’s reasoning in the matter was simple and direct:
Hitler had been murdering Jews right and left. I saw it, and I dream about it even to this day. The Jews needed some place where they could go. It is my attitude that the American government couldn’t stand idly by while the victims [of] Hitler’s madness are not allowed to build new lives.
The reasoning clearly echoed his thinking in propounding the Truman Doctrine: it was up to the United States to stand for simple justice when the vulnerable and besieged were being set upon by tyrannizing outside forces. Such things moved his thinking even more than questions of geopolitical calculation.
Despite all these accomplishments, Truman would have an uphill fight in winning the presidency in his own right in fall 1948. The hangover of 1946 was still in the air, and the electorate still seemed to lean Republican in its mood. To make matters worse, his own Democratic Party was coming apart, splintering into three factions. As the party mainstream began to move away from its historical stance opposing black civil rights in the South, a southern “Dixiecrat” contingent left the party in opposition and nominated its own candidate (Strom Thurmond of South Carolina) for president, and a Progressive faction for which Truman and the mainstream did not go far enough did the same, nominating Henry A. Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate. Truman hardly seemed to stand a chance.
And yet, thanks to the lackadaisical campaigning of his Republican foe, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, and thanks to Truman’s own stupendous thirty-one-thousand-mile “whistle stop” campaign tour of the country by train, he pulled off a great upset, winning the election by more than two million votes and by a 303–189 margin in the Electoral College. Now the nation would see what Truman could do, elected in his own right. What they knew now about him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that he was a fighter.
As in his first term, foreign-policy concerns would dominate Truman’s attention, and the going would be just as tough as before. In fact, the early months of his new term saw a series of setbacks, including a new crop of troubles in Asia.
First there was China, which had been in a state of civil war since the 1920s, when Chinese Nationalist forces had been fending off a challenge from Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong for control of the country. That conflict was interrupted by the war with Japan but resumed in late 1945. Although the Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, had the support of the United States, they were widely perceived by the Chinese people (and by some American military commanders on the ground) to be corrupt and oppressive, and Chiang did not enjoy much popular support. The Communists, on the other hand, were seen as a patriotic anticolonial force that stood for Chinese political and cultural independence over against foreign domination, whether that of Japan or of European colonizers such as Britain or France. The Communists had won over the peasantry, who expected to benefit from the large-scale land reforms that, under Mao Zedong, they promised to implement.
By the end of 1949, the Communists had won the war and had pushed the Nationalists off the Chinese mainland onto the large coastal island of Formosa (later renamed Taiwan). This was seen as a stunning setback for Truman’s approach to foreign policy and a humiliating and unnecessary “loss” of China, for which Truman’s Republican opponents did not hesitate to denounce him. It was true that Truman seemed to have suffered from an uncharacteristic indecisiveness regarding American policy in China. But his indecision was partly due to the complexity of the situation. Containment could not work in Asia as well as it had in Europe, precisely because of the extent to which the Communist cause came to be linked with the intense desire of many Chinese to be free of domination by foreign influences, a desire that had already manifested itself vividly in the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901 and had only grown during the years of brutal Japanese occupation. In Eastern and Central Europe, however, where containment meant the preservation of national independence against Soviet encroachment, the opposite was the case.
In any event, the most populous nation on earth, a people with whom Americans had long had friendly relations, and with which the United States had been aligned in the war against Japan, was now a Communist-ruled country and a near-certain antagonist, as the Nationalist remnant on Taiwan survived and continued to be recognized by the United States as the sole legitimate Chinese government. It was an enormous shock to find the tables turned so suddenly and massively. To make matters worse, at just the same time that Mao’s revolution was succeeding, the Soviet Union successfully exploded an atomic bomb, bringing to an end America’s brief monopoly over nuclear weapons. Finally, in 1950, Stalin and Mao signed a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, which created a massive Communist bloc and gave powerful credence to the fear that Communism was an ideology bent upon world domination, and that its time had arrived.
Small wonder that so sudden and alarming a reversal of fortunes would give rise to national soul searching and executive rethinking. One of the immediate fruits of that rethinking was NSC-68, a confidential study of Cold War strategy produced by the National Security Council, an organization that had been created just after the war to advise the White House on matters of national defense. NSC-68 proposed a massive increase in spending on defense, along with a willingness to form alliances with non-Communist countries around the world, as pillars of American policy moving forward. Both, of course, represented dramatic changes from American military doctrine since the nation’s beginning. Both the republican aversion to standing armies and the Washingtonian aversion to entangling alliances were being set aside.
In addition, fears of foreign subversion, coming from Communists and other radicals both outside and inside the government, manifested themselves much as they had in the Red Scare of the post–World War I era. The Truman administration instituted a loyalty program in the federal government, leading to the dismissal or resignation of hundreds of federal employees. Eleven leaders of the American Communist Party were jailed under the Smith Act of 1940, with their convictions upheld by the Supreme Court. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, first formed during wartime to ferret out Nazi sympathizers, was reactivated to seek out Communists and Communist influence, not only in government but also in the film industry and other institutions of civil society. Most notoriously of all, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin carried on a one-man campaign against purported Communist influences and sympathies in the government, using the weapon of often baseless accusations to create an atmosphere of fear in the country, particularly among those of left-leaning sympathies.
In retrospect, this second “red scare” seems excessive to many historians and other observers, and “McCarthyism” remains to this day a byword for reckless, evidence-free, reputation-staining accusation. But not all of his concerns were groundless, and when considered in the setting of its times, in the context of a nation that still was emerging into an entirely new role after a long period of relative detachment, the reaction may not seem quite so excessive. In addition, we know much today that we did not know at the time, thanks to the opening of Soviet archives and the release of decoded secret diplomatic cables to researchers, and we know now that espionage was a serious problem and that there were foreign communist agents active in the U.S. government. We know that a series of sensational espionage cases raised legitimate concerns about the security of vital national secrets. We know that in the case of figures like atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, secrets relating to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb were passed along to Soviet agents, treasonable acts that almost certainly helped to speed the development of such weapons and thereby aid a deadly enemy.
The Cold War turned hot in 1950, when the United States found itself again at war – this time on the Korean peninsula, confronting a communist foe. Japan had occupied the peninsula during the Russo-Japanese War and had annexed it in 1910. But after the defeat of Japan in 1945, a vacuum had been created. Soviet troops had streamed in to occupy the northern portion of the peninsula, even as American forces occupied the southern portion. There had never been any plan for a permanent division. But the evolving situation in postwar Germany would soon be repeated in postwar Korea as the Soviets established a communist government in the north and the Americans a Western-style democracy in the south. The dividing line between the two became the thirty-eighth parallel, with no plan for unification in sight.
It was an uneasy situation not destined to stay peaceful for long. On June 25, 1950, a wave of eighty thousand North Korean troops swept down into South Korea. It is not clear whether they did so at the direct bidding of Moscow, though it is hard to believe that Soviet encouragement was not somehow involved, and Truman certainly had no doubts on that score. When told of the invasion by his secretary of state, the suave Yale-educated diplomat Dean Acheson, Truman responded without hesitation and with characteristic bluntness: “Dean, we’ve got to stop the sons-of-bitches no matter what.” Here was a prime test case for containment in Asia. But rather than approach the conflict as an Americans-only action, with a full declaration of war, Truman took a different path. He took the matter to the United Nations (UN) and sought its approval of a “peacekeeping” force that would fend off the North Korean assault. The Security Council agreed, and the U.S. Congress supported the idea, accepting a characterization of the intervention as a “police action” by the UN rather than a war by the United States. But in the end, it was primarily an American effort, with General Douglas MacArthur in command, although fourteen other nations contributed.
The war went very badly at first, partly due to the element of surprise. The South Korean army was not battle ready, and only five hundred American advisors were on the ground on June 25. The North Koreans drove their enemy all the way down the peninsula to Pusan, at the southernmost tip, occupying the South Korean capital of Seoul on the way. But then MacArthur countered on September 15 with a brilliantly effective amphibious invasion at Inchon, Seoul’s port city, well behind the lines of the advancing North Korean intruders. He cut off the invaders, retook Seoul, and began pushing the remnants of the North Korean army northward, seeking (with UN approval) to reunify the country by force.
MacArthur proceeded almost to the Chinese border in the north, ignoring Chinese warnings against such encroachment. Then, on November 25, a wave of more than a quarter million Chinese troops swept across the border, overwhelming the UN forces and pushing them back into South Korea, with the battle line finally stabilizing around the thirty-eighth parallel. It had been yet another dizzying reversal in this seesaw conflict.
At this point, MacArthur and Truman locked horns over what to do next. MacArthur claimed that with the Chinese intervention, it was a “whole new war” and a prime opportunity for the United States to rid the world of a dangerous Communist China before it consolidated power fully. He wanted to go after the Chinese full force, even making use of the nation’s nuclear weapons, using naval superiority to enforce a blockage of Chinese ports and unleashing the Nationalists from Taiwan in an invasion of the mainland. Truman strongly disagreed, as did his advisors, and thought that a war with China would be a “booby trap,” a fatal temptation that the United States needed to avoid at all costs.
It did not take long for the general, who had an ego the size of Asia itself, to overstep his bounds. He had taken to making policy statements on his own, without clearing them with Washington, and often directly contradicting presidential positions. When MacArthur took it upon himself to criticize Truman in an official letter to the House minority leader, proclaiming that “there is no substitute for victory” – a direct rebuke to the “containment” policy, and the related policy of “limited war” – Truman felt he had no choice but to fire him for insubordination, which he did on April 11, 1951. It was a politically costly act for Truman, because MacArthur was a war hero, much beloved, and the containment policy was always a difficult and unsatisfying one to pursue. When MacArthur returned to the country, his first return home to the United States since 1937, he received one of the largest ticker-tape parades in New York’s history, a nineteen-mile-long affair winding through the streets of Manhattan and viewed by at least seven million cheering spectators. Meanwhile, Truman’s personal popularity sank like a stone and remained low, going down to 22 percent in the early part of 1952, which remains the lowest mark ever recorded by an American president since Gallup began polling for approval ratings in the 1930s. No American president had been more deeply unpopular for a longer period of his time in office than Truman, and he knew better than to attempt to run for a second full term.
Yet no American president has seen his reputation rise more steadily in the years since his time of service. Over time, the American people have come to understand and appreciate the fact that Truman’s actions prevented another world war, whereas MacArthur’s preferred path would have embraced one, with consequences beyond imagination. Truman had the burden, a burden he shouldered honorably and wisely, of shepherding the nation through times of great changes, and many of the results were unwelcome or unsatisfying in the short term. Statesmanship is often like that, as many previous episodes in American history, such as the controversy associated with Jay’s Treaty at the nation’s beginnings, or with Lincoln's leadership in the Civil War, serve to illustrate.
There is no prettifying the fact that the end result of the Korean War was a stalemate which became a truce, and there was never a final peace conference capped by a settlement and a treaty. In effect, there was never really an end to this undeclared war, only a cessation of hostilities, with de facto recognition of a line slightly north of the thirty-eighth parallel as the boundary between the two hostile Koreas – a single people divided by happenstance, with a narrow demilitarized zone, a no-man’s land, separating the two parts.
The situation remains largely unchanged in 2019, at the time of this writing. More than thirty-three thousand Americans, some one million Koreans, and an unknown number of Chinese died to preserve that separation. It was a success for containment, yes, but a coldly rational success at best, like that of a sports team that plays only for a tie, and a confirmation of Walter Lippmann’s warning about containment’s difficulties arising out of its lack of a tangible object.
By the time an uneasy truce had been established in 1953, the United States had a new president. Republicans had been alive with anticipation at the prospect of electing one of their own as president to succeed the unpopular Truman and end the Democrats’ twenty-year domination of the presidency. They ended up nominating a national war hero who was not a politician and whose wide appeal could attract independent and crossover voters, including patriotic southern Democrats. General Dwight David Eisenhower, a career army man from the American heartland, had been supreme Allied commander and the hero of D-Day in the Second World War and brought to the political arena an aura of moderation and nonpartisan executive competence. At the time the Republicans recruited him to run for president, he was serving as the first supreme commander of NATO forces, an indication right out of the gate of his commitment to the new postwar order, in contrast to the lingering isolationist tendencies of some in his party.
In his campaign, Eisenhower promised to “clean up the mess in Washington” and to secure an “early and honorable” peace in Korea. Given his history, voters felt that this was a man who could in fact get the job done. His unequaled record of achievement and his tone of general managerial competence, combined with a winning smile and great personal amiability – “I Like Ike” was perhaps the best campaign-button slogan ever – made him unbeatable, particularly against the Democrats’ candidate, the witty but relatively unknown governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson, who could not generate popular enthusiasm for his candidacy and, in the end, could not even win his home state. It was said that the Democrats’ slogan should be “Sadly for Adlai.”
There was a decided shift in tone with the new president. Eisenhower favored a more fiscally conservative approach to government spending, and budget balancing was, after many years of deficit spending, high on the domestic agenda. In general, however, he did not challenge the essential architecture of the New Deal, either by contracting it or expanding it, although in a few cases – such as the extension of Social Security disability benefits – he extended the reach of programs. He filled his administration with business executives, such as his secretary of defense, Charles Wilson of General Motors. As a military man who was accustomed to the extensive use of top-down chain-of-command authority, and the extensive delegation of duties along the lines of the organizational chart, Eisenhower had a different management style and was less visible to the public and less accessible to the press than his immediate predecessors had been. This low-key style led many contemporary journalists to underestimate his leadership abilities, which were considerable but exercised discreetly and indirectly, using persuasion rather than force – a “hidden-hand presidency,” as the political scientist Fred Greenstein dubbed it.
Indeed, if there is a single word that could encompass what the Eisenhower administration excelled in accomplishing, that word might be consolidation, using that word not in the Founders’ sense but to describe a process by which changes are accepted and absorbed into a more settled condition. He brought a degree of composure and unity to the new circumstances in which the United States found itself, a sense of order after decades of disruption. This was as true in foreign policy as it was in domestic policy; in neither case did Eisenhower seek to overturn the key precedents set by his Democratic predecessors. Instead, he sought to improve their implementation and bring their costs under control.
Using shrewd pressure tactics, Eisenhower achieved an armistice in Korea, with the return of American prisoners of war. He worked behind the scenes to bring to an end the reckless career of Senator McCarthy. He continued, and expanded, Truman’s program for ensuring government security, insisted that Soviet espionage remained an ongoing concern, and refused to stay the execution of the nuclear spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Despite occasional talk coming from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, of “rolling back” Communist influence and using aggressive “brinksmanship” (including the brandishing of nuclear weapons) to achieve foreign-policy goals, Eisenhower tried his best to continue the fundamentally cautious and defensive policy of containment that Truman had established and the far-flung role in the larger world that the United States now seemed destined to play.
But the growing reliance on the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, which both sides of the Cold War now possessed in growing power and numbers, produced a curious, though predictable, side effect. Because the possibility of a nuclear face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union was so unthinkable – it would be, as the strategists said, “mutual assured destruction” – the action of the Cold War found its way into more remote and particular channels, “brushfire” wars in the undeveloped or developing nations of the world, which were beginning to be called the Third World, to distinguish them from the Western capitalist democracies and the Communist bloc dictatorships, respectively. As the colonial empires of France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain all began to break up, new countries began to form – India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ghana, and many others – and became pawns and proxies in the contest of the two contending superpowers. Governments, including that of the United States, turned to unconventional forces, including the use of covert forces, to accomplish their foreign-policy goals.
Such secret actions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa often took the form of morally questionable acts that cut against American traditions and led to longer-term resentment and distrust of the United States. For example, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped to overthrow a leader in Iran who had attempted to seize the holdings of foreign oil companies and supported the return of the Iranian monarch, Reza Pahlavi, who became a staunch American ally. It was a short-term success for American policy but one that would have far less favorable longer-term consequences in subsequent years. One of the goals of American Cold War policy was the effective positioning and projection of American power, in ways meant to contain Communism, but another goal was winning the hearts and minds of inhabitants of Third World countries, whose struggles with poverty and hopelessness were precisely the struggles that George Marshall had described in his Harvard commencement. Often the effective pursuit of the first goal made pursuit of the second goal difficult to impossible.
Much of Eisenhower’s busy administration was preoccupied with the management of a profusion of foreign-policy challenges, too many for us to discuss in detail here. But three deserve particular attention.
The first involved the fall of French Indochina. The French had lost their Southeast Asia colony to Japan during the Second World War and had unwisely chosen to fight against anticolonial independence movements to regain it. As in China, the anticolonial cause in Indochina became championed by Communists, notably the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, and thus was assimilated into the larger Cold War fabric. In 1954, the French forces were decisively defeated and chose to give up Indochina, which was divided by a settlement reached in Geneva into three independent nations: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. As in Korea, and in Germany, Vietnam came to be temporarily divided at the seventeenth parallel, occupied in the north by Communist forces and in the south by pro-Western or anti-Communist ones, including many Catholics.
Eisenhower had tried to keep the United States out of this situation. He had refused the French request for intervention in 1954 and only reluctantly aided the emerging South Vietnamese regime, under Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese Catholic who had opposed both the French and the Communists. Eisenhower provided advisors who helped with the training of troops and law enforcement personnel but drew the line at American troops – and insisted that Diem establish democratic norms and enact land reforms to help the desperately poor peasantry. But Diem did not follow through on his end of the bargain and even refused to allow an election in 1956, as had been prescribed in the Geneva accords, to reunify the country. Eisenhower was stuck with a corrupt and unreliable ally, but one deemed essential to preventing a Communist takeover of the region.
Another important foreign-policy event occurred in the Middle East, where the chief challenge to American policy was balancing the American commitment to Israel with the need for good relations with the oil-rich Arab states, most of which were hostile to Israel’s very existence. When Egyptian general and pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in 1956, he actively sought to exploit the superpower rivalry. When the United States refused to help him build the Aswan Dam, he went to the Soviet Union for help. Then Nasser took the bold move of seizing the Suez Canal, which ran through Egyptian land but was jointly owned by the British and French. The British and French, in cooperation with Israel, responded with military force and retook the canal. But Eisenhower, sensitive to American standing in the Arab world, turned in anger against his former allies and insisted that they withdraw, even initiating a UN resolution condemning the action. And the forces withdrew.
This incident was important because it firmly established for all the world to see something that was already plain after the end of the Second World War: the United States now called the tune when it came to the foreign policy of the Western democracies, and its allies did not have the liberty to act independently, particularly when it came to their colonial or quasi-colonial holdings. The Indochinese situation, and the Greek situation before it in the Truman years, had illustrated a similar point: it was up to the United States to take care of the entities to which the now defunct colonial empires of the great European powers could no longer attend.
Finally, there was the disturbing loss of Cuba to a Communist dictatorship. The United States had a long and often tense relationship with Cuba, going back to the early nineteenth century, when it was a wealthy Spanish colony. During most of the 1950s, the United States had supported the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who in turn was widely accommodating to a range of US business interests (including networks of organized crime), which he allowed to dominate the island’s economy. Nevertheless, when Fidel Castro, a young revolutionary who successfully fought a guerrilla war against Batista’s regime, came to power in 1959, Eisenhower quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new government, and many Americans applauded Castro and hoped he would be an instrument of democratic reform. They miscalculated badly. Instead, Castro declared himself a communist and made it clear that he was hostile to the United States and welcomed Soviet support. He began enacting land reforms and nationalizing foreign-owned businesses and properties in Cuba, and exiles streamed out of the country into southern Florida. By the time Eisenhower left office in early 1961, diplomatic relations with Cuba had been suspended, and the problem of what to do about Castro would be left to Eisenhower’s successor.
In this chapter, we have concentrated on foreign relations in the postwar era, touching on domestic affairs mainly to remark upon the economic recovery and general prosperity of the postwar years. But there was a major development on the domestic scene in the postwar era that we shall reserve for a full treatment in the next chapter but that warrants mentioning in this context – the emergence of one of the great social movements of American history, the logical successor to abolition: the movement to secure full civil rights for African Americans.
It is no coincidence that the civil rights movement, whose beginnings are traceable back to the earliest years of the century, began to gather steam in the years immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War, a war that was fought abroad in the name of ideals that were not being fully embodied or lived out at home. At some point, a contradiction of that magnitude becomes hard to ignore. Returning American GIs of all colors brought back stories of Nazi racialist atrocities. Returning black American GIs who had risked their lives for their country, only to find themselves consigned to ride in segregated railroad cars to return to their segregated towns, did not need the war to bring home to them the reality of racial discrimination. But other Americans perhaps did need a shock of recognition to bring the contradiction home to them.
As in the case of Alexis de Tocqueville, the insights of a foreign observer proved especially helpful to Americans’ ability to see themselves more clearly. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in a massive and highly influential 1944 study called An American Dilemma, formulated it in this way: there was a deep contradiction at the heart of American society, a contradiction between American ideals and American practices. Myrdal introduced the idea that there was what he called the “American Creed,” a set of informal but binding affirmations that holds Americans together and defines their social and political order. The Creed was based on a belief in universal human equality, freedom, and opportunity; but the condition of American race relations stood in glaring contradiction to that belief. In this respect, too, America at midcentury was a time when all thoughts and things were split.
But Myrdal did not counsel despair, because the struggle was not an unfamiliar one. In fact, “America,” he concluded, “is continuously struggling for its soul.” The struggle was the burden imposed by the nation’s outsized aspirations; being a land of hope meant always being willing to shake off the weight of fatalism and push ahead. Myrdal read American history hopefully, as “the gradual realization of the American Creed” that defined the nature of American society. One or the other had to give; either the Creed had become empty, or the practice of racial subordination had to come to an end. Which would it be? Finding the answer would be one of the most important items on the American agenda in the second half of the twentieth century.