Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (2 page)

Grand Expectations

Prologue: August 1945

At 7:00
P.M.
EWT (Eastern War Time) on August 14, 1945, President Harry Truman announced to a packed press conference that World War II had ended. It was Victory over Japan (V-J) Day. Hearing the news, crowds that had stood all day in front of the White House set up a chant, "We want Harry." Truman, with his wife Bess at his side, shortly appeared on the lawn. "This is a great day," he said. "The day we've all been looking for. . . . We face the greatest task . . . and it is going to take the help of all of you to do it."
¹

Joyous celebrations followed, enlivening a two-day holiday proclaimed by the President. In Harlem, the
New York Times
reported, "couples jived in the streets and the crowd was so large that traffic was halted and sprinkler trucks . . . were used to disperse pedestrians." In Italian-American sections of Brooklyn "tables were brought to the streets and food, wine, and liquor were offered to passersby." In other cities the story was much the same. Office workers in St. Louis dumped waste paper and bags filled with water from their windows, and cars dragged tin cans over the pavements. San Franciscans lit bonfires, pulled trolleys from the tracks, and spun the city's cable cars around on their turntables. In Seattle a navy petty officer walked hand-in-hand with his wife down a main street. Someone asked about his plans for the future. "Raise babies and keep house!" he shouted happily as he stopped to kiss his wife.
²

Not everyone, of course, was so joyful. In Memphis a woman sat dejectedly on a park bench, a Navy Department telegram clutched in her hand. She was the latest of millions of Americans who lamented the loss of loved ones: 405,399 United States military personnel died as a result of war-related fighting, and 670,846 suffered non-fatal wounds. These were small numbers in the wider context of history's bloodiest war, which cost the lives of an estimated 60 million people throughout the world, including some 6 million European Jews murdered by the Nazis.
³
Still, American casualties were heavy in contrast to other twentieth-century wars: World War I, for instance, had killed 116,516 Americans and wounded 204,002.
⁴

Many people in the United States had other cause for concern in August 1945: uncertainty about the future. Some worried about the ability of Truman, new to the presidency, to cope with the postwar world—and especially with the Soviet Union. Other Americans were scared about the economy. Government defense spending, by far the largest public works project in the nation's history, had brought great prosperity to a nation that had suffered through the Depression in the 1930s. But officials at the War and Navy departments, frightened that surpluses would pile up, now began to cancel war orders. Some economists feared that the cutbacks, combined with the return to civilian life of 12.1 million military personnel, would lead to unemployment of 8 million people by early 1946.
⁵
That would have been around 13 percent of the labor force. To people who vividly remembered the Great Depression, this prospect was unsettling indeed. The writer Bernard De Voto recognized this and other concerns as sources of a "fear which seems altogether new. It is not often acknowledged," but "it exists and it may well be the most truly terrifying phenomenon of the war. It is a fear of the coming of peace."
⁶

Racial tensions aroused further nervousness in 1945. During the war masses of blacks had fled poverty-stricken areas of the South to work in northern and western defense plants, where conflicts over jobs and housing occasionally broke into violence. Race riots had erupted in Harlem and Detroit in 1943. Many other blacks had joined the armed services, where they protested against systematic segregation and discrimination. Secretary of War Henry Stimson cried in alarm, "What these foolish leaders of the colored race are seeking is at bottom social equality."
⁷
One black man exclaimed bitterly, "Just carve on my tombstone, here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man."
⁸
Another wrote a "Draftee's Prayer":

Dear Lord, today
I go to war:
To fight, to die,
Tell me what for?
Dear Lord, I'll fight,
I do not fear,
Germans or Japs;
My fears are here.
America
⁹

Some Americans in August 1945 worried especially about the legacy of the most momentous event of that time: the near obliteration by atomic bombs of Hiroshima on August 6 and of Nagasaki on August 9. Could the world survive with atomic weapons? Truman, sailing back to the United States from a deadlocked meeting with the Soviet Union at Potsdam, seemed unconcerned. "This [the bombing of Hiroshima] is the greatest thing in history," he told crew members on the ship. The sailors, foreseeing the end of war, cheered. But Truman was probably more uneasy than he let on. After learning of the first successful test of the A-bomb, at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on July 16, he had written in his diary, "I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of mortals. . . . We are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there'll [be] a reckoning—who knows?" A week later he brooded apocalyptically on "the most terrible thing ever discovered. . . . It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark."
¹⁰

Truman, of course, was not alone in reflecting on destruction and doom. J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the Bomb" at Alamagordo, was moved to quote from the
Bhagavad Gita
, "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. . . . I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."
¹¹
Following the slaughter—mostly of civilians—at Hiroshima,
Newsweek
editorialized, "There was a special horror in the split second that returned so many thousand humans to the primeval dust from which they sprang. For a race which still did not entirely understand steam and electricity it was natural to say: 'who next?'"
Time's
cover of August 20 was bleak: a harsh black X painted across the center of the sun.
¹²

Though few Americans said so at the time, it was clear that the decision to drop the bombs reflected the broader hatreds that been unleashed during the savagery of fighting. As early as February 1942, war-inspired fears had prompted the forcible removal of 112,000 Japanese-Americans, the majority of them American citizens, to "relocation centers," mainly in dismally arid regions of the West. This was the most systematic abuse of constitutional rights in twentieth-century United States history. Later in 1942 General Leslie McNair, director of training for American ground forces, told servicemen, "We must lust for battle; our object in life must be to kill; we must scheme and plan night and day to kill." Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, a commander in the Pacific, was even more blunt. He told his men, "Kill Japs, kill Japs, and then kill more Japs." After the ceremony of Japanese surrender on the battleship
Missouri
, Halsey told reporters that he would "like to have kicked each Jap delegate in the face."
¹³

Truman, too, experienced the toughening that came with the war. When an official of the Federal Council of Churches, upset by news of Hiroshima, urged him not to bomb again, the President (knowing that Nagasaki or some other Japanese city was about to be destroyed) replied, "Nobody is more disturbed over the use of the atomic bomb than I am, but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, and then murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast."
¹⁴

Most Americans, agreeing with Truman, hailed news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A poll immediately thereafter discovered that 75 percent were glad that the bombs had been dropped. Like Truman, they thought the Japanese deserved what they got and that use of the Bomb hastened the end of the war, saving innumerable lives in the process.
¹⁵
People further delighted in the fact that the United States, indisputably the number one military and economic power in the world, was sole possessor of the Bomb and could use it to enforce peace in the years ahead. Many Americans expected that the United States would preside over what
Time
magazine publisher Henry Luce had called in 1941 the "American Century"—the spread of democracy and capitalism throughout the world. Walter Lippmann, a widely read columnist, predicted in 1945, "What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow."
¹⁶

Most Americans in 1945 also believed firmly that the fighting had been worth it—it had been a Good War. Domestic tensions notwithstanding, World War II had promoted not only scientific-technological marvels such as the Bomb (and penicillin) but also unparallelled prosperity. Some people, downplaying the persistence of class divisions, thought that the collective effort had inspired greater social solidarity. "We are all in this together" was a common phrase during the war. Together the American people had produced magnificently, fought valiantly, and destroyed their evil enemies. They would join harmoniously to make things better and better in the years ahead.

There seemed ample reason in August 1945 for these high expectations. Although the government was cutting back on orders, it was also lifting irritating wartime regulations. The day after V-J Day the War Production Board revoked many of its controls on industry. Gasoline rationing came abruptly to an end. So did the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, restrictions on travel to sports events, even a ban on singing telegrams. Magazines jubilantly reported accelerating production of all sorts of consumer goods that had been hard to buy in the war: washing machines, electric ranges, cotton goods, girdles and nylons, cameras and film, shoes, sporting goods, toys (such as electric trains), and a fantastic array of home appliances. Automobile production, sharply limited before the Japanese surrender, was expected to boom to 3 million or more by 1947.

It also seemed in 1945 that Americans had succeeded in forming an uneasy consensus behind a degree of governmental stimulation of the economy. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, while stymied by conservatives since 1937, appeared safe from repeal. In 1944 Congress had already approved legislation—the so-called GI Bill of Rights—that promised millions of veterans generous government aid for higher education and home-buying. Builders anticipated a boom in construction that would stimulate the entire economy. Truman, meanwhile, promised to fight for a "full employment" bill during the congressional session that was set to convene on September 5.
¹⁷

Grand expectations indeed lifted the mood of August 1945. Americans, having fought to win the war, expected to dominate the world order to come. Although worried about a return of economic depression, they had reason to hope that wartime prosperity would continue. The enemies had been defeated; the soldiers and sailors would soon return; families would reunite; the future promised a great deal more than the past. In this optimistic mood millions of Americans plunged hopefully into the new postwar world.

1
Veterans, Ethnics, Blacks, Women

Many things that middle-class Americans took for granted by the 1960s scarcely existed for the 139.9 million people who inhabited the forty-eight states in 1945 or for the 151.7 million in 1950. Consider a few of these things: supermarkets, malls, fast-food chains, residential air-conditioning, ranch-style homes, freezers, dishwashers, and detergents. Also ballpoint pens, hi-fis, tape recorders, long-playing records, Polaroid cameras, computers, and transistors. And four-lane highways, automatic transmissions and direction signals, tubeless tires, and power steering. In 1945 only 46 percent of households had a telephone; to get long distance, people paid a good deal and asked for an operator. In 1950, 10 percent of families had television sets and 38 percent had never seen a TV program. Although 33 million of America's roughly 38 million households in 1945 had radios, these were for the most part bulky things cased in wooden cabinets, and they took time to warm up. Some 52 percent of farm dwellings, inhabited by more than 25 million people, had no electricity in 1945.
¹

The United States in 1945 had become a more urban nation than earlier in the century. The Census Bureau reported that 96.5 million people, or nearly two-thirds of the population, lived in "urban" areas in 1950. But this definition counted as "urban" all places having 2,500 or more residents. The number living in places with 10,000 or more was 73.9 million, less than half the total population. And the number in places with 50,000 or more totaled only 53.3 million, a little more than one-third of the population. In many of the towns and villages the elm trees still stood in stately power, not yet destroyed by blight. Most American cities presented architecturally stolid fronts featuring a good deal of masonry and little aluminum or glass. Only a few, such as New York and Chicago, had much of a skyscraper center. Suburbs had long surrounded major cities, but there had been relatively little residential building in the 1930s and early 1940s, and the fantastic sprawl of suburbia was only beginning by the mid-1940s. Culturally as well as demographically the United States remained in many ways a world of farms, small towns, and modest-sized cities—places where neighbors knew each other and in which people took local pride. Mail came twice a day to homes.

Many aspects of daily life for most Americans had changed little between the early 1930s and the mid-1940s, years of depression and war. There were 25.8 million cars registered in 1945, nearly one for every three adults. But this was only 2.7 million more cars than in 1929, when there had been 18 million fewer people. Not many Americans in 1945, as in 1929, dared to travel by air; if they lacked a car, they took a bus or a train, or they stayed close to home. Most still consumed "American" cuisine: roasts, fried chicken, burgers, fries, corn, tomatoes, pie, and ice cream.
²
People did not eat out much, and the TV dinner did not arrive until 1954. Americans dressed in clothes made from natural fibers, which needed ironing and wrinkled badly in the heat. Business and professional men always wore coats and ties in public and never (save when playing tennis) appeared in shorts. Almost everyone, men and women alike, wore hats outdoors. People still thought in small sums: annual per capita disposable income in current dollars was $1,074 in 1945. At that time it cost three cents to mail a letter and a nickel to buy a candy bar or a Coke. Relatively few Americans had hospital insurance or company pensions, though Social Security was beginning to become of some use to the elderly who had been employed. In 1945 urban families spent an average of $150 a year on medical care. All Americans did without such later developments as polio vaccines, birth control or hormone pills, and legal abortions, and they expected as a matter of course that their children would get measles, chicken pox, and mumps.

Young people listened avidly to popular new singers like Frank Sinatra, but so, too, did older Americans: as yet there was no sharply defined "teenage" music. Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," introduced in 1942, remained one of the best-selling songs ever, and Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, and the Andrews Sisters sang hit after hit in a thriving pop music business that turned out 189 million records in 1950, some 80 million more than five years before. "Country and western" music (no longer called "hillbilly") was also booming, with Hank Williams producing a series of million-record favorites before dying of drugs and alcohol in the back seat of a car on New Year's Day 1953. Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, led the charts in late 1950 with "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."
³

Until the late 1940s, movies continued to be a favored form of popular entertainment, attracting a weekly attendance of 85 to 90 million people a year between 1945 and 1949. Entertainment remained rather tame, at least by contrast to later standards: it was virtually impossible in the late 1940s to find nudity in films or magazines. No one at that time could have foreseen a popular culture featuring rock 'n' roll, let alone a world of big-selling magazines such as
Playboy
(which arrived on the newstands in 1953 with its famous centerfold of Marilyn Monroe). One historian has concluded: "The United States in 1950 still bore a resemblance—albeit a rapidly fading one—to the small-town America idealized in the Norman Rockwell paintings that graced the covers of the highly popular
Saturday Evening Post
."
⁴

"A
CULTURE
,"
THE CRITIC
Lionel Trilling wrote in 1951, "is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate—it is nothing if not a dialectic." The sociologist Daniel Bell later elaborated on this theme of culture-as-contest in maintaining that the United States remained a "bourgeois"
society
in the postwar years, even as it was developing an adversarial "modernist"
culture
.
⁵
Their observations are relevant to American society and culture in the late 1940s, which were complex, diverse, and rent with anomalies and contradictions. The United States during these years—and later—was a bewilderingly pluralist society that rendered any static vision, such as Norman Rockwell's, largely irrelevant.

Begin with an especially numerous and visible group: servicemen and their families. In all, 16.4 million Americans, the vast majority of them young men, joined the armed services during World War II. More than 12.1 million of them were still in uniform in early August 1945. This was nearly two-thirds of
all
American men aged 18 to 34 at the time. Young, numerous, male in a male-dominated culture, and eager to make up for time "lost" during the war (and, for many, during the Depression), the returning veterans placed a firm stamp on American culture and society during the 1940s and thereafter. Their experiences, while varying according to regional, racial, class, and personal circumstances, offer revealing angles of vision into cultural ambiguities in the postwar era.

Most of these young men had volunteered or been taken without a fuss by the draft. Like most Americans, they were deeply patriotic, and they had served because it was their duty. Many had fought bravely. But most of them, polls suggested, had not cherished idealistic notions about destroying fascism or building a brave new world. One poll in September 1945 found that 51 percent of American soldiers still in Germany thought that Hitler, while wrong in starting the war, had nonetheless done Germany "a lot of good." More than 60 percent of these men had a "very favorable" or "fairly favorable" view of Germans—about the same percentage that viewed the French in this way.
⁶
Many American soldiers also resented the special privileges enjoyed by officers.
⁷
Stars and Stripes
said, "A caste system inherited from Frederick the Great of Prussia and the 18th century British navy is hardly appropriate to the United States . . . the aristocracy-peasantry relationship characteristic of our armed forces has a counterpart nowhere else in American life."
⁸

In late 1945 the soldiers and sailors wanted above all to come home, get out of the service, and rejoin their families. Many deluged hometown newspapers and members of Congress with demands for transport home and release from military duty. "No boats, no votes." Their wives and girlfriends were equally anxious to get on with "normal" life. Many wives sent angry pleas, along with baby booties, through the mail to Capitol Hill. An anonymous GI poet added:

Please Mr. Truman, won't you send us home?
We have captured Napoli and liberated Rome;
We have licked the master race,
Now there's lots of shipping space,
So, won't you send us home?
Let the boys at home see Rome.
⁹

The clamor of GIs largely succeeded. Demobilization proceeded at a very rapid pace. By June 1946 the number in service had dropped to 3 million, and Congress had agreed to authorize an army of only 1 million by July of 1947. For a while the returning troops were treated as heroes. But like veterans throughout history, they found that life had gone on without them. Many, yanked from home for years, deeply resented civilians who had stayed out of the service and prospered. Seizing chances to move ahead, more than 8 million "vets" took advantage of the "52–20" provision of the GI Bill of Rights, which provided $20 per week for up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment (or earnings of less than $100 a month). A form of affirmative action (a phrase of later years), the GI Bill cost $3.7 billion between 1945 and 1949.
¹⁰
Other veterans, including thousands who had married hastily while on wartime leave, could not adjust to married life. The divorce rate in 1945 shot up to double that of the prewar years, to 31 divorces for every 100 marriages—or 502,000 in all. Although the divorce rate dropped in 1946 and returned to prewar levels by the early 1950s, its jump in 1945 exposed the rise of domestic tensions in the immediate aftermath of war.

Many of these tensions were captured in a revealing Hollywood film,
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946). Based on a novel by MacKinlay Kantor, it won nine Academy Awards. As befitting a product of Hollywood, it ended on an upbeat note by affirming the quest for security of three veterans returning to Boone City, an archetypal American community. But the title is also ironic and the story disquieting—so much so, in fact, that the right-wing House Committee on Un-American Activities later considered questioning the writer Robert Sherwood about the script.

In the course of readjusting to civilian life the movie's three veterans encounter, sometimes bitterly, what they perceive as the runaway materialism and lack of patriotism of postwar American society. One veteran (Fredric March) gets a job as a loan officer at a bank, only to be chastised by higher-ups for softness to struggling veterans seeking assistance. "Last year," he complains, "it was kill Japs. This year it's make money!" He ultimately copes, with the help of his understanding wife (Myrna Loy) and his grown children. The second vet (Dana Andrews) at first cannot find his wife (Virginia Mayo), whom he had married after a brief courtship during the war. When he locates her—she is a nightclub performer—he realizes that she is tough and self-centered. Soon she leaves him. He finally lands menial "women's work" in a heartless chain store, but there he encounters a grouchy male customer who criticizes the war and all who fought in it. Furious, the veteran slams him in the jaw and is fired. In the end he finds a job helping a company use discarded war planes for the building of prefabricated houses. The third veteran lost both hands in the war and manages with hooks instead. But he feels useless in an acquisitive society, faces terrible problems of readjustment, and survives only because of the love of his loyal girlfriend next door.
¹¹
Though the ending is schmaltzy, there was bite enough in the film to distinguish it from a Norman Rockwell vision of the nation.
The Best Years of Our Lives
captured rather well the stresses encountered by many veterans and their families in the immediate aftermath of war.

T
HE EXPERIENCES
of America's diverse ethnic and racial groups, while defying easy categorization, also revealed some of the tensions of postwar American society. The nation's population of 139.9 million in 1945 included nearly 11 million foreign-born and 23.5 million people of foreign-born or mixed parentage. Most of these 34.5 million people, 25 percent of the population, were of European descent, including some 5 million whose roots were in Germany, 4.5 million from Italy, 3.1 million from Canada, 2.9 million from Poland, 2.8 million from Great Britain, 2.6 million from the USSR, and 2.3 million from Ireland (Eire). Substantial numbers also hailed originally from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, and Norway. Many more Americans, of course, had European roots dating from the third generation or farther back. Negroes, as most people then called African-Americans, numbered nearly 14 million, or 10 percent of the population. The census identified a much smaller number, 1.2 million, as people of Mexican background, though there were many others (no one knew how many) who made themselves scarce at enumeration time. The Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were concentrated in a few places, mostly in Texas, the Southwest, and southern California. In Los Angeles they were already numerous enough during the war to frighten white residents, who launched gang attacks on them in the streets. By contrast Asians, most of whom had long been excluded from the United States by racist immigration laws, were numerically tiny in 1945: Chinese-Americans numbered around 100,000, Japanese-Americans around 130,000. There were approximately 350,000 people who told the census-takers that they were Indian (Native American).
¹²