Historical Overview of the Postwar U.S.
Introduction: Age of Conformity and Consensus vs Anxiety and Rebellion
The postwar era that forms the
background to Herb Brown’s political play has been assigned different names by
social commentators and historians, including the Age of Conformity, the Age of
Consensus, the Age of Anxiety. The consensus and conformity of the era
grounded “The Establishment,” that generation most recently labeled the
“Greatest Generation”, and which became the target of so much unrest in the
1960s. The children of The Establishment,
ironically and perhaps as the Establishment would have it, ungratefully,
attacked the very values upon which America
was built. The 1950s was a time of
paradox, for all of these forces—consensus, conformity, rebellion—existed
simultaneously, feeding off of one another.
Changes in the media—movies, radio, and television—underscored the
paradoxes of the era.
To begin to understand the era, we
must remember that several major forces influenced politics and society at the
time: the memory of the Great Depression
and World War II; the business-government partnerships that responded to these
two crises; the emergence of the Cold War, with the conflict between democratic
capitalism and communism replacing the tensions of the 1930s and 1940s between
democracies and totalitarian governments; the resulting atomic arms race and
second Red Scare/McCarthy era; the unleashing of consumerism (whose expansion
in the 1920s had been restrained by the Depression and World War II); and, the
unparalleled “Baby Boom” (77 million born between 1946 and 1964).
In some ways, as historian William
L. O’Neill argues in his book, American
High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960
(1986), President Eisenhower’s two terms in the White House underscored
Americans’ beliefs in the “American way” and the nation’s power. Had not the nation weathered the Great
Depression and led the free world to victory over three totalitarian
governments? Was not the economy
expanding with low inflation even in the face of several recessions and offering
more mobility to more Americans than ever before? Americans had, moreover, appeared to come to
grips with the fact that some government programs were necessary to counter the
unwanted consequences of capitalism. Many
now accepted that the New Deal and wartime programs that remained actually
promoted individual prosperity: Social
Security supplemented retirement savings, protecting against catastrophic
losses. Veterans’ benefits paid back
service men and women and created more productive citizens, who would then buy
homes and consumer goods. Government
building of infrastructure (e.g., the 1956 Interstate
Highway Act) promoted economic expansion. And the government’s monitoring and tweaking
of the macro-economy (Council of Economic Advisers, deficit spending),
regulation of the banks and other important industries (transportation and
utilities especially), and refereeing between labor and management all
contributed to the prosperous times.
In the American society of the
1950s, then, there was a consensus about the “American way.” But there existed also uncertainties abroad
and at home that made Americans anxious and uneasy. The U.S.
did not hold a monopoly over nuclear power.
The government published pamphlets on how to survive an atomic attack
and had school children learn how “to duck and cover.” How powerful was the Soviet Union? Was it enough for the U.S.
to “contain” Soviet expansion? How much
help were the Europeans going to be able to give, given their shattered
economies? Would they want to do so,
given their experience with two great wars?
How did the Cold War fit into the wave of independence movements
spanning Africa, the Middle East,
South Asia, and the Far East? Could the U.S.
economy support all of these independence movements against Soviet
aggression? Given America’s
legacy of anti-colonialism, should the U.S.
sponsor the independence movements? And
the Europeans again: They did not act in
concert with the U.S.
during the Suez crisis; could they
be counted on to help contain communist aggression? Then there was the Middle East
and oil: How long could the U.S.
domestic oil supply remain the “balance wheel” of the global economy?
Closer to home, other forces made
Americans anxious and uneasy. How many
traitors were there in American government agencies? Was the threat overblown? Yes, some traitors had indeed been
discovered; but, was the government (and private citizens’ groups) undermining
American values in order to save America? Was that tenable?
African Americans, especially in
the South but in urban areas as well, were unhappy—and getting angrier—with
their place in American society. They
demanded access to economic opportunities (good jobs and schools) and to public spaces
(urban transit systems, restaurants, parks)denied them by Jim Crow laws and
racial customs. They demanded basic
civil rights in the society (freedom from violence, right to vote, fair jury
selection). The emergence of the civil
rights movement, moreover, underscored the hypocrisy of American foreign
policy, which preached political and social freedoms. And then, later in the decade of the 1950s,
some white Americans engaged in “massive resistance” to deny black Americans
the changes they were demanding. Meanwhile,
President Eisenhower proved reluctant to take a stand on the issues.
Other anxieties plagued
Americans: Were the advertisers on radio
and television controlling their purchases, as some social commentators
alleged? Why should what one owned or spent
determine one’s status? Wasn’t America
about the lack of status and classes?
Why should we buy cookie cutter houses that looked all the same? What was the consumer society doing to
American individualism? to American frugality? to the Baby Boom generation?
The media that brought Americans
the consumer society—and politicians like Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and John
F. Kennedy—brought them new ideas as well.
Numerous kinds of music were emerging; some of it resurrected older
styles (bluegrass, hillbilly) while others challenged commercial styles (behop, jazz, folk). Hollywood
films not only promoted patriotism and American exceptionalism,
but also encouraged teenagers to rebel against their parents. And sex seemed to be rampant throughout the
media, from the French-inspired two piece bathing suits to Marilyn Monroe and Jane
Mansfield sensually cavorting on the wide screen. And then there was that guy Elvis gyrating
across the television screen, a white guy singing African American gospel and
rock ‘n roll. For the Americans of The Establishment,
the generation that had lived through the Depression and World War II, the
world abroad and the nation at home challenged all that they stood for, the
American way of peace and prosperity.
And while Collier’s, Life, and Time Magazine, along with television
shows like Father Knows Best and The Ozzie and Harriet Show, promoted
domesticity and female subservience to husbands, did all American women want to
follow that ideal? (Who
was really in control in the Arnaz family—Lucy or Desi?) And what about the men? Were they really happy working in impersonal
bureaucracies on a “career track”? What
was the “corporateness” of American business and
government doing to the society? Was
“group think” really healthy for promoting capitalism and democracy? Social commentators began to question
bureaucracy: The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955); The Organization Man (1956); The
Status Seekers (1959). And, irony of
ironies: At the end of the period, as he
bade farewell to the American people, none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower—the
epitome of the age of conformity, consensus, and bureaucracy (he was an Army
general)—sternly warned the American people against the growing threat of the
industrial-military complex.
The rest of this introduction to
the historical background of the play focuses on a few key issues—the Cold War
defined, the Cold War Abroad, the Red Scare/McCarthy era, Civil Rights, and the
Media. Each includes brief summaries of
the issues and Eisenhower’s and Nixon’s position in each. Material in other areas of
the web site include more detail on these and other issues.
The Cold War
The Cold War was the conflict
between the forces of democratic capitalism and communism that emerged during
and after World War II, lasting until the late 1980s and early 1990s. At its core, the Cold War pitted the values
of the U.S. against the values of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) through all forms of diplomacy—ideological debate, economic support for
friends, and military aid for friends to be used against foes. Direct military engagement, the final choice
of diplomacy when all else fails, was not a hallmark of this conflict and that
is why it is labeled the “cold” war.
The Cold War
Abroad
In 1947, the Truman Administration decided
to engage in what was at the time believed to be a temporary strategy in the
Cold War—containment. The idea was that
the U.S. would
“contain” the further spread of communism until policy makers could come up
with a better strategy. Containment became
established U.S.
policy in 1950.
President Harry S Truman announced
the ideological component of containment in 1947 in his speech on Greece
and Turkey. The U.S.,
the president declared, was committing itself to defending free peoples around
the world whenever they were threatened from without or from within by
communist forces. The lynchpin of the
economic component of containment was the Marshall Plan (1947-1948ff), which
involved American money and aid going to the devastated nations of Western
Europe so that they could rebuild and expand their economies to
withstand Soviet aggression. Other
American monies also supported containment (Greece
and Turkey, for
example). The workings of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (established in 1944 with
strong U.S.
backing and financial support), were other aspects of the economic component of
containment. These organizations were
intended to stabilize the world trading community (IMF) to prevent emergence of
the economic nationalism that had brought on the Great Depression and
underscored conflicts leading to World War II and to help developing countries
(World Bank) bolster their economies along a western, liberal, democratic model
so that communism could be contained.
The military aspect of the
containment policy centered on NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. Established in 1949, NATO
was based on the notion of collective security—an attack on any member of the
organization would be considered an attack on all members. In effect, of course, it would be the U.S.
that would protect the Western European nations if they were attacked by the Soviet
Union.
President Eisenhower supported the
basic outlines of containment and during the 1952 campaign spoke of adding
“liberation” to the policy. As
president, however, he did not support the high costs that came with being the
principal agent of the strategy. He
proposed a “New Look” foreign policy that relied on “more bang for the
buck.” This led to some confused policy
making. On the one hand, Eisenhower
promoted the idea of “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR;
on the other hand, his administration’s rhetoric and actions often undermined
that goal. He and his Secretary of
State, John Foster Dulles, employed the threat of “massive retaliation” (using
nuclear weapons) to thwart attempts to expand communism. Eisenhower expanded the notion of collective
security through SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, 1954), even as he
refused to lend much aid to the French in Indo China
(Vietnam)—getting
involved in a land war in Southeast Asia, the president
believed, was “a silly idea.” His
administration threatened the use of nuclear weapons during 1954-1955 to stop
the People’s Republic of China
from responding to the aggressive actions of the Nationalist Chinese (Taiwan)
on the islands of Quemoy and Matsu.
Eisenhower’s knowledge of Europe’s
economic needs and his work as NATO commander lay behind his actions in the Middle
East. He ordered the CIA to
stage a coup in Iran
in late 1953 to stabilize the political situation there and protect European
access to oil reserves. (A short term success, the action gave rise to the hostage crisis
in 1979-1980.) In 1956 the Suez
crisis erupted when France
and Great Britain
invaded Egypt to
regain control of the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s
socialist leader Abdul Nasser had nationalized.
Eisenhower was furious with the Europeans’ actions (abetted by Israel)
and, with help from the Soviet Union, was able to force
the Europeans to retreat. In 1957, he
proclaimed the Eisenhower Doctrine, which extended containment to the Middle
East. In 1958, instability
in Lebanon led
Eisenhower to send 14,000 U.S.
troops to the Beirut airport. Eisenhower claimed there was evidence of
communist activity, but in reality it was a local conflict over Arab
nationalism that had brought on the instability and the president knew that; he
wanted stability in the Middle East to protect (at that time) the Europeans’
major source of petroleum.
Another aspect of Eisenhower’s
conflicting foreign policy can be seen in his “atoms for peace” initiative,
which he announced in 1953. Soviet
leader Khrushchev did not believe Eisenhower’s sincerity and continued to exert
strong influence, and in some cases outright military action (Hungary
1956), over Eastern Europe. In 1958, however, Eisenhower’s restrained
handling of a crisis in Berlin
impressed Khrushchev and the latter agreed to a summit in 1960 that would focus
on developing a test ban treaty.
Eisenhower, however, continued to direct over-flights of the USSR
by the U-2 spy plane and one was shot down, thus ending any chance at holding
the summit. Towards the end of his
presidency, moreover, Eisenhower ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
to prepare plans for an invasion of Cuba,
with the goal being liberation of the Cuban people from the communist leader,
Fidel Castro.
Eisenhower had done much to
institutionalize the Cold War, even as he tried to hold down the costs (he
reduced the Defense budget from $50 billion to $40 billion), prevent an arms
race, and preserve peace. Thus, by the
1960 presidential campaign, the Cold War abroad had become a prime issue for
the Democrats. Their presidential
nominee, John F. Kennedy, claimed that there was a “missile gap” and that the
preceding 8 years of Eisenhower-Nixon leadership had allowed that to
happen. In fact, there was no missile
gap.
The Red
Scare/McCarthy Era (1947-1955ff) [see also Historical
Chronology, 1944-1961, Other
Historical Personalities]
Many politicians employed the Cold
War and the fear of communism it engendered to rise to power during this
time. Others, like Eisenhower for a long
time, did not know how to respond effectively to the movement. Some politicians, moreover, worried about a
“garrison state” emerging in reaction to the Cold War, a consequence they
believed would undermine the very values for which the Americans and the West
were battling the communists.
The Second Red Scare began in 1947
when Truman, advised that he would have “to scare the hell out of the American
people” if he were to get funding for his containment policies, and fearing
that Republicans would label him “soft on communism,” spoke out on the threat
of communism abroad—and at home. He
authorized the Federal Employee Loyalty Program (FELP) and ordered the FBI to
develop a list of government employees who might be subversive. Together, the list and FELP violated
Americans’ fundamental rights to know their accusers and to be assumed innocent
until proven guilty. Of the nearly 4
million employees and prospective employees investigated during Truman’s
presidency, 378 were dismissed or denied employment. Another 2,000, however, left their government
jobs under clouds of suspicion. No cases
of espionage were discovered through FELP investigations. President Eisenhower revamped the internal
security program and, in the process, actually removed more employees than did
Truman (2,611 “security risks” fired; another 4,300 resigned). By the mid-1950s, however, individuals in the
press and in all three branches of government—the executive, the judicial, and
the legislative—began to expose the internal security programs for violating
civil liberties. Thereafter, steps were
taken to control the processes that had trampled Americans’ rights.
Meanwhile, in 1947, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been
instituted in the 1930s but had faced fading support for its actions lately,
began hearings investigating the influence of communism in Hollywood. Hollywood
had promoted the war effort through its stars and its movies (including movies
supporting the American ally, the Soviet Union). Tinseltown was
central to American culture at mid-century and was big business, both at home
and abroad. Many movie script writers,
however, had been members of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s (though most
had left after only a short time); other writers and artists connected to Hollywood
held political sympathies with communism or values on the “left” of the
political spectrum. But many Hollywood
artists were in fact apolitical--at least until HUAC targeted them for
investigation, first in 1947.
The HUAC hearings of 1947 and
later prove embarrassing today. U.S.
congressmen questioned Hollywood stars on why they acted
in movies that depicted “Russians smiling” (the government had asked them
to!). Many witnesses were ordered by the
congressmen to “name names” of “fellow travelers,” a clear attack on the
American notion against “guilt by association.”
Ironically, Richard Nixon’s pursuit of Alger Hiss [see Richard M. Nixon]
represented an exception to the rule of HUAC investigations, although the press
did not see it that way at the time.
Senator Joe McCarthy came late
(1950) to understanding how politically helpful it would be to “go after
communists.” His actions—particularly
the “big lie” technique in which he claimed to have a certain number of
confirmed subversives in his files, only to change the number on subsequent
occasions—worked because the press allowed it to work. Sometimes McCarthy would call a press
conference to announce that he would have another press conference shortly when
he would have more information. And the
press continued to buy into his antics.
Only when television displayed his behavior in the Army-McCarthy hearings
did the American people wake up to his fraudulent behavior. Finally, with some prodding from the
Eisenhower administration behind the scenes, Congress voted to condemn
McCarthy’s actions.
Civil Rights
[For an outline of the Civil Rights
story, see Historical
Chronology, 1944-1961]
In the 1930s, the New Deal
Democratic coalition included African American voters from the North. By the late 1940s, however, the black vote
was not as solidly Democratic as it had been.
Some Republicans (Thomas E. Dewey, Wendell Willkie,
Henry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits), most from the
Northeast, believed the party should do more to court black voters. The Democrats, meanwhile, added a civil
rights plank to their 1948 platform and President Truman ordered final
desegregation of all of the nation’s armed services. This led to the formation of the Dixiecrat party, a group of Southern white Democrats who
opposed the national government’s interference in “social affairs.”
President Eisenhower was not
committed to social equality (nor was President Truman, actually). While preferring to ignore the civil rights
issues if he could, Eisenhower did favor removing Federal laws that supported
Jim Crow discrimination. He was not
interested in employing the national government to force desegregation or to
force changes in social attitudes.
Still, his Attorney General’s office quietly lent support to preparation
of a brief for the Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka (1954), in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared
segregated school systems unconstitutional.
In 1957, the president was persuaded that the actions of the state and
local authorities in Little Rock, Arkansas,
demanded Federal intervention, and he sent in Federal troops to enforce a
school desegregation order. He said it
was his constitutional duty as president to enforce orders of the courts. Eisenhower preferred consensus, not
government force, but he was also, as president, supposed to enforce the law.
While vice president, it appeared
that Nixon held some sympathies for African Americans. He was instrumental in working with Senate
Majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson to bring about the watered-down Civil Rights
Act of 1957. And at times he seemed to
understand better than Eisenhower how important the issue was to …
politics. Indeed, although at first
sympathetic to a civil rights program, later in his 1960 presidential campaign
Nixon abandoned the northeastern liberal wing of the Republican party to court
support from the South. Ironically, that
strategy might have made the difference between defeat and victory in November
1960. (Of course,
Nixon’s “southern strategy” of attracting southern conservative Democrats to
vote Republican brought him victory in 1968).
The Media
“The media” of the postwar era was
undergoing immense changes in large measure because of technological
innovation.
Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine and Life Magazine, had begun influencing American culture back in the
1920s and 1930s with his mass circulation magazines. He promoted “personalities as news,” focusing
on politicians as well as artists. Luce
was the originator of the “American Century” idea (in a 1941 editorial) and an
unabashed supporter of the Nationalist Chinese against the Communist Chinese;
much of what Americans knew about China in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s came
from Luce publications.
With the development of television
(the technology had been available in the 1930s) and the transistor (it
replaced the cumbersome “vacuum tube”) in the late 1940s, Americans became
bombarded with more media images and sounds than ever before. Competition was fierce. While radio benefited from the profusion of
musical styles, it lost ground to television in the news departments (as did
the daily newspapers). The weekly
magazines also suffered from competition among themselves and with television.
The 1940 Republican Convention was
broadcast on television to an audience of 50,000 in three cities; and while the
1948 and 1952 conventions had more television coverage, it is Richard Nixon’s
“Checkers Speech” that is generally regarded as the watershed event that
brought politics and campaigning to television.
Ironically, of course, it was the media that undermined Nixon’s campaign
for president in 1960: The television made John F. Kennedy look better. A majority of those who watched the first
debate on television gave Kennedy the win; those who listened to it on radio
chose Nixon as the winner. (See Nixon
and the Media) Given that
by then 9 out of 10 American homes had a television, political campaigning
would continue to take advantage of the medium.
(See also Dwight D.
Eisenhower)