Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (3 page)

Some of these people, such as Japanese-Americans, suffered greatly during the war. Others, such as the majority of Indians, continued to live in an especially dismal poverty. But many other ethnic groups were better off in the late 1940s—or at least felt a little more at home—than in the prewar era. The war, in so many ways a powerful force in the domestic history of twentieth-century America, was an engine that accelerated acculturation. Millions of Negroes and first- and second-generation Americans served in the armed forces or pulled up stakes to work in defense plants, thereby leaving their enclaves and mixing for the first time with "old-stock" white people. Having joined in the war effort, they also came to identify more emotionally with the United States. As Cold War tensions mounted over the next two decades, many European-Americans, especially those who had roots behind the iron curtain, emerged as among the most patriotic—and super-patriotic—of United States citizens.
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Still, it was wrong to assume, as many hopeful observers did at the time, that the war and acculturation were working some kind of amalgamating magic. Regional tensions and differences, especially North versus South, remained profound. So did ethnic feelings. Laws from the 1920s had drastically reduced legal immigration, thereby cutting the percentage of foreign-born people in the United States in 1945 to around 8 percent. This was the lowest percentage—to that time—in twentieth-century American history. But the nation was still far from having become a melting pot in which ethnic and religious differences had fused into a common "American" nationality.
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Religious differences, indeed, remained very strong in the 1940s. Some 71.7 million Americans, more than half the population, said they belonged to religious groups in 1945, roughly 43 million of them in Protestant denominations, 23 million Catholic, and nearly 5 million identifying themselves as Jewish.
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These people inhabited an increasingly secular world in which theological dictates carried less weight than in earlier generations but in which church membership was nonetheless increasing, from 49 percent of the population in 1940 to 55 percent in 1950 (and to an all-time high of 69 percent by 1959).
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Whether church-going much affected personal behavior of course sparked many debates, but the upward trend in attendance was noteworthy and impressive. More and more Americans obviously considered it important to their self-identities to be members of an organized religion. Few Western populations, including the Catholic countries of Europe, came close to matching America's record of church-going in the postwar years.

It was difficult, moreover, to find much of an ecumenical spirit among these religious Americans. Protestant denominations still evoked strong loyalties in the 1940s and early 1950s. Conservative evangelical groups became more active, forming in 1947 the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and benefiting from the formidable recruiting talents of spellbinders like the youthful Billy Graham, then in the conservative wing of American Protestantism.
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Anti-Catholic feelings remained strong. Paul Blanshard's polemically anti-Catholic
American Freedom and Catholic Power
(1949) was a best-seller for six months. It attacked the Catholic Church for what Blanshard considered its support of reactionary governments, its repressive attitude toward questions of personal morality, and its hierarchical organization, all of which Blanshard said were intrinsically un-American. Blanshard focused especially on the inflammable contemporary issue of state aid to parochial schools, which the Supreme Court upheld by a 5-to-4 decision in 1947.
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Jews, too, felt the sting of criticism and exclusion. They confronted systematic discrimination in gaining entrance to prestigious colleges, universities, and professional schools, and in securing teaching tenure. It was hardly surprising that most Jews and Catholics—many of them among the first- and second-generation immigrant population—clung, often resentfully, to their churches, synagogues, clubs, and neighborhoods.

Many of these "new-stock" Americans, though relatively poor at the close of World War II, had acquired property, which they cherished as a sign of their social mobility and which further deepened their commitment to their neighborhoods. (In Chicago, foreign-born residents actually had higher rates of home-ownership than others in the city).
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These and other first- and second-generation Americans embraced often quite separate subcultures featuring neighborhood festivals, schools, churches, and above all their extended families.
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They cherished their own cuisine and modes of dress and supported a flourishing foreign-language press. In the early 1940s there were 237 foreign-language periodicals in New York City, 96 in Chicago, 38 in Pittsburgh, and 1,000 in the nation as a whole, with a circulation of 7 million. Roughly 22 million people, one-seventh of the population, told census enumerators in 1940 that English was not their native tongue.
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T
HE LIVES
of black Americans in the late 1940s, like those of America's more recent immigrants, also improved on the average. Thanks in part to the rapid mechanization of cotton production in the early 1940s, which ultimately threw millions of farm laborers out of work, and in part to the opening up of industrial employment in the North during the wartime boom, roughly a million blacks (along with even more whites) moved from the South during the 1940s. Another 1.5 million Negroes left the South in the 1950s. This was a massive migration in so short a time—one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history—and it was often agonizingly stressful.
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The black novelist Ralph Ellison wrote in 1952 of the hordes of blacks who "shot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our springs—so sudden that our gait becomes like that of deep-sea divers suffering from the bends."
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Still, many of the migrants gradually reaped unprecedented benefits. The number of Negroes employed in manufacturing jumped from 500,000 to 1.2 million during the war. The percentage of employed black women who worked as domestic servants—before the war one of the few jobs they could get—declined from 72 to 48 during the same period. Blacks also advanced on other fronts, which seem token in retrospect but represented notable achievements at the time. In 1944 for the first time a black reporter was admitted to a presidential press conference; in 1947 blacks gained access at last to the Senate press gallery.
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Thanks in part to legal pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Supreme Court in 1944 outlawed the "white primary," a ploy that had enabled states in the South to exclude blacks from all-important Democratic primary races.
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In 1946 the Court ruled against segregation on conveyances engaged in interstate travel.
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In 1945 Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signed the black baseball star Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract. It was understood that if he was good enough he would become the first Negro player in modern times to play in the Big Leagues. In 1947 he did, beginning a career of stardom with the Brooklyn team.
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Many of these changes came because blacks themselves demanded them. As early as 1941 A. Philip Randolph, head of the all-Negro sleeping-car porters' union, had threatened a "march on Washington" if the federal government did not act against rampant discrimination in the armed services and publicly contracted employment. To prevent the march, President Roosevelt gave in and issued an executive order against such treatment. He also set up a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to oversee things. The order was widely evaded, but Randolph's boldness nonetheless encouraged blacks to pursue further protest. The
Pittsburgh Courier
, a leading black newspaper, demanded a "Double V" during the war, victory over fascism and imperialism abroad and over racism at home. Civil rights leaders recognized that ordinary blacks were growing more and more restless and angry. Roy Wilkins, a leader of the NAACP, wrote a fellow activist in 1942, "It is a plain fact that no Negro leader with a constituency can face his members today and ask full support for the war in light of the atmosphere the government has created."
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The groundswell of protest was indeed growing: membership in the NAACP, by far the most important civil rights organization, increased from 50,000 to 450,000 during the war.

Students of the "Negro problem" in the early 1940s had grand expectations about the potential for this groundswell. This feeling especially gripped the scholars who collaborated with Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist who published in 1944 An
American Dilemma
. This was a much-acclaimed study of race relations in the United States. The "dilemma," Myrdal thought, stemmed from the historic conflict between the "American Creed" of democracy and equality and the reality of racial injustice. Myrdal amply documented the power of such injustice, identifying the "vicious circle" of prejudice and discrimination that had victimized black people in the United States. But he had faith in American ideals, and he was optimistic about the future. Negroes, he argued, could no longer be regarded as a "patient, submissive majority. They will continually become less well 'accommodated.' They will organize for defense and offense. They will become more and more vociferous." Whites, he added, would surely resist change. "The white man can humiliate the Negro; he can thwart his ambitions; he can starve him." But whites did "not have the moral stamina to make the Negro's subjugation legal and approved by society. Against that stands not only the Constitution and the laws which could be changed, but also the American Creed which is firmly rooted in the Americans' hearts." Not since Reconstruction, Myrdal wrote with emphasis,
"has there been more reason to anticipate fundamental changes in American race relations, changes which will involve a development toward American ideals
."
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With the advantage of hindsight it is clear that
An American Dilemma
had its limitations as analysis. Myrdal and his collaborators were first of all too affirmative, too optimistic about the potential of the "American Creed." White racial prejudice and structural discrimination proved to have great staying power. Second, Myrdal assumed that whites would lead the way to change: like most people in the 1940s, he underestimated the rage and determination of blacks, who were stirring to take matters into their own hands. As Ellison's black protagonist exclaimed in
Invisible Man
, "You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them [whites] recognize you."
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This did not happen much in the 1940s, but it did in the 1960s, when advocates of "black power" pushed whites out of the civil rights movement.

Myrdal also accepted conventionally unflattering views of African-American culture.
"In practically all its divergences,"
he wrote,
"American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture
It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture." An American Dilemma
deplored the "high Negro crime rate," as well as the "superstitition, personality difficulties, and other characteristic traits [that] are mainly forms of social pathology." Myrdal concluded,
"It is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans."
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During the racial confrontations of the 1960s, An
American Dilemma
encountered rising criticism from activists and scholars who disputed Myrdal's optimism about white liberalism, as well as his negative statements about certain aspects of African-American culture. In the mid- and late 1940s, however, the study received virtually unsparing praise. W.E.B. Du Bois, the nation's most distinguished black historian and intellectual, hailed the book as a "monumental and unrivaled study." So did other black leaders, ranging from the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, whose criticisms of lower-class black culture influenced Myrdal's arguments, to the novelist Richard Wright, whose bitter autobiography,
Black Boy
, appeared in 1945. Prominent white intellectuals—the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the sociologist Robert Lynd, the historian Henry Steele Commager—concurred in this approbation. The near unanimity in support of Myrdal's message reflected the rising expectations among liberals for racial and ethnic progress at the close of the war.

Amid this atmosphere of hope, activists for racial justice pressed for change on a number of fronts in the mid- and late 1940s. One front was to desegregate the military. Some blacks, like Bayard Rustin, refused to submit to the draft—partly on pacifist grounds, partly in protest against Jim Crow in the armed services. He went to prison for his temerity. Most American Negroes, however, were ready and willing to fight: they composed 16 percent of Americans enlisted in the armed services during the war, though they were only 10 percent of the population. Approximately a million Negroes served between 1942 and 1945. But they confronted discrimination at every turn. The navy accepted Negroes only for menial tasks, often to serve as mess attendants. The army took in blacks but set up segregated training camps and units and refused to train blacks as officers. It also assumed that Negroes were poor fighters and hesitated to send them into combat. Secretary of War Stimson explained that blacks should serve under white officers, because "leadership is not imbedded in the Negro race yet and today to make commissioned officers lead men into battle—colored men—is only to work a disaster to both."
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