Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (144 page)

4.
American casualties in later wars were still more modest, especially given the larger populations: 54,246 killed and 103,284 wounded in Korea, and 58,151 killed and 153,303 wounded in Vietnam. All figures include war-related non-battlefield deaths. The population of the United States was 139.9 million in 1945, 151.7 million in 1950, 194.3 million in 1965, and 204.9 million in 1970.

5.
Newsweek
, Aug. 20, 1945, p. 33; Aug. 27, 1945, p. 29.

6.
Lawrence Wittner,
Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941–1960
(New York, 1969), 114. See also Alan Winkler,
Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom
(New York, 1993).

7.
Richard Polenberg,
War and Society
(Philadelphia, 1972), 124.

8.
William Leuchtenburg et al.,
The Unfinished Century: America Since 1900
(Boston, 1973), 454.

9.
Wittner,
Rebels Against War
, 47.

10.
Paul Boyer, "'Some Sort of Peace': President Truman, the American People, and the Atomic Bomb," in Michael Lacey, ed.,
The Truman Presidency
(Washington, 1989), 192; Robert Ferrell,
Harry Truman and the Modern American Presidency
(Boston, 1983), 54–56. See also Boyer's much lengthier account of American attitudes toward atomic energy between 1945 and 1950,
By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
(New York, 1985).

11.
David Halberstam,
The Fifties
(New York, 1993), 34.

12.
New York Times
, Aug. 20, 1945, p. 19;
Time
, Aug. 20, 1945. See
chapter 5
for a fuller account of American decisions to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

13.
Wittner,
Rebels Against War
, 105.

14.
Boyer, "'Some Sort of Peace,'" 176.

15.
Many historians believe that Japan was on the verge of surrender before Hiroshima and that America's use of the bomb was unnecessary. For more on this angry debate see
chapter 5
. Critical accounts of American policy include Barton Bernstein, ed.,
The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues
(Boston, 1976); Gar Alperovitz,
Atomic Diplomacy and the Decision to Use the Bomb
(New York, 1995); Robert Messer,
The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War
(Chapel Hill, 1982); Martin Sherwin, A
World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance
(New York, 1975); and Kai Bird,
John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment
(New York, 1992).

16.
Alan Brinkley, "For America, It Truly Was a Great War,"
New York Times Magazine
, May 7, 1995, pp. 54–57.

17.
Time
, Aug. 20, 1945, p. 21;
Newsweek
, Aug. 27, 1945,29, pp. 34–35.

1.
J. Ronald Oakley,
God's Country: America in the Fifties
(New York, 1986), 20–22; William O'Neill,
American High: The Years of Confidence
, 1945–1960 (New York, 1986), 1–4. Except where otherwise indicated statistics here and elsewhere come from
Statistical History of the United States, from Colonial Times to the Present
(New York, 1976).

2.
Harvey Levenstein,
Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
(New York, 1993), 119–22.

3.
Oakley,
God's Country
, 11–13.

4.
Ibid., 21.

5.
Lionel Trilling,
The Liberal Imagination
(New York, 1951), 9; Daniel Bell, "The Culture Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965–1992,"
Wilson Quarterly
(Summer 1992), 74–117.

6.
Joseph Goulden,
The Best Years, 1945–1950
(New York, 1976), 19–49; Frederick Siegel,
Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan
(New York, 1984), 36.

7.
I. F. Stone,
The Haunted Fifties, 1953–1963
(Boston, 1963), 185.

8.
Goulden,
Best Years
, 31.

9.
Ibid.

10.
Ibid., 46–49.

11.
A useful book on postwar film is Nora Sayre,
Running Time: Films of the Cold War
(New York, 1982). See 50–52.

12.
Here, as in later chapters, I often use terms widely used at the time, such as "Negro" or "Indian." Through 1950 the classification of population by "race" was usually obtained by the enumerator's observation. Persons of mixed white and "other" parentage were normally not counted as white. The category "Indian" included unmixed American Indians together with persons of mixed white and Indian ancestry if they were enrolled on an Indian reservation or Indian agency roll. Persons who were part Indian were considered Indian if they were one-fourth or more Indian, or if they were regarded as Indians in the community in which they resided. Starting in 1960 (and completely in 1970) the census relied more on people's self-classification. With the rise of ethnic and racial self-pride and assertiveness, especially after 1965, the number of people who called themselves "Indian" or "Native American" rose dramatically. The census missed many people, especially the poor. African-Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican-Americans, and some other groups were therefore undercounted.

13.
Gary Gerstle,
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City
, 1914–1960 (New York, 1989).

14.
The record high census year of foreign-born was 1910, with 14.7 percent. The record low census year was 1970, with a percentage of 4.7. See Rubén Rumbaút, "Passages to America: Perspectives on the New Immigration," in Alan Wolfe, ed.,
America at Century's End
(Berkeley, 1991), 212ff, for a useful survey.

15.
Figures on religious affiliation depended heavily on reports submitted by the churches themselves; these varied in completeness and need to be read with caution. The gross aggregates here, as included in
Statistical History
, 391–92, are probably reasonably accurate.

16.
Stephen Whitfield,
The Culture of the Cold War
(Baltimore, 1991), 83–84.

17.
James Hunter and John Rice, "Unlikely Alliances: The Changing Contours of American Religious Faith," in Wolfe, ed.,
America at Century's End
, 318–39; George Marsden, "Evangelicals and the Scientific Culture: An Overview," in Michael Lacey, ed.,
Religion and Twentieth-Century Intellectual Life
(Washington, 1989), 23–48.

18.
Everson v. Board of Education
, 330 U.S. 1 (1947); Diane Ravitch,
The Troubled Crusade: American Education
, 1945–1980 (New York, 1983), 29–39.

19.
Arnold Hirsch,
Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago
, 1940–1960 (New York, 1983), 185–200.

20.
Herbert Gans,
The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans
(New York, 1962), remains a classic depiction of a postwar ethnic community of this sort, in Boston.

21.
Richard Polenberg,
One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since
1938 (New York, 1980), 34–36.

22.
Nicholas Lemann,
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
(New York, 1991).

23.
Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man
(New York, 1952), 332.

24.
Harvard Sitkoff,
The Struggle for Black Equality
, 1954–1992 (New York, 1993), 3–19; Manning Marable,
Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America
, 1945–1990 (Jackson, 1991), 13–39; David Goldfield,
Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture
, 1940
to the Present
(Baton Rouge, 1990), 45–62; and William Harris,
The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War
(New York, 1982), 123–89, are four of many books that deal in part with postwar race relations. See also James Jones,
Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Experiment, a Tragedy of Race and Medicine
(New York, 1981), for a particularly egregious story of racist science.

25.
Smith v. Allwright
, 321 U.S. 649 (1944).

26.
Morgan
v.
Virginia
, 328 U.S. 373 (1946).

27.
Jules Tygiel,
Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
(New York, 1983). No blacks had been permitted to play in the National Football League between 1934 and 1945. They were readmitted (in very small numbers) thereafter mainly because of competition from the newly formed All-American Football Conference, which signed two black players in 1946 and five more in 1947. The National Basketball League (Association after 1950) had one black player, beginning in 1946, but did not otherwise open up its gates until 1950. See Arthur Ashe, Jr., A
Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete Since
1946 (New York, 1988); and Richard Davies,
America's Obsession: Sports and Society Since 1945
(Ft. Worth, 1994), 35–62.

28.
Walter Jackson,
Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism
, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 235.

29.
Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy
(New York, 1944), lxi; Jackson,
Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience
, 161–73, 197–201.

30.
Ellison,
Invisible Man
, 7–8.

31.
Myrdal,
American Dilemma
, 928–29; Jackson,
Gunner Myrdal and America's Conscience
, 170, 225–26.

32.
Jackson,
Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience
, 234–36; Polenberg,
One Nation Divisible
, 76; John Diggins,
The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941–1960
(New York, 1988), 28; Charles Moskos, "From Citizens' Army to Social Laboratory,"
Wilson Quarterly
(Winter 1993), 10–21.

33.
Polenberg,
One Nation Divisible
, 77.

34.
Goulden,
Best Years
, 353.

35.
There were no official government definitions of poverty in the United States until 1963. A statistic such as this reflects later government estimates of what it had meant to be "poor"—living below (arbitrary) government notions of contemporary standards of minimum subsistence—in the 1940s. Contemporary definitions of poverty in the 1940s were harsh compared with those of the much more affluent 1960s, when many people defined as "poor" owned automobiles, televisions, and other household conveniences. If 1960s definitions of poverty had been applied to the less affluent 1940s, the percentage of African-Americans defined as "poor" at that time would have been higher than 70 percent. The point, of course, is that most blacks in the 1940s lived, as always, at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

36.
Polenberg,
One Nation Divisible
, 26, 74.