by Jill Lepore
“A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade,” Bush warned. “Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for ages past.”9
At Bush’s urging, Congress debated a bill to establish a new federal agency, the National Science Foundation. Critics said the bill tied university research to the military and to business interests and asked whether scientists had not been chastened by the bomb. Scientific advances did indeed relieve people of drudgery and produce wealth and leisure, but the history of the last century had shown nothing if not that these benefits were spread so unevenly as to cause widespread political unrest and even revolution; the project of Progressive and New Deal reformers had been to protect the interests of those left behind by providing government supports and regulations. Could this practice be applied to the federal government’s relationship to science? Democratic senator Harley M. Kilgore, a former schoolteacher from West Virginia, introduced a rival bill that extended the antimonopoly principles of the New Deal to science, tied university research to government planning, and included in the new foundation a division of social science, to provide funding for research designed to solve social and economic problems, on the grounds that one kind of knowledge had gotten ahead of another: human beings had learned how to destroy the entire planet but had not learned how to live together in peace. During Senate hearings, former vice president Henry Wallace said, “It is only by pursuing the field of the social sciences comprehensively” that the world could avoid “bigger and worse wars.”10
Many scientists, including those who belonged to the newly formed Federation of Atomic Scientists, agreed, and two rivulets of protest became a stream: a revision of Kilgore’s bill was attached to a bill calling for civilian control of atomic power. Atomic scientists launched a campaign to enlist the support of the public. “To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy,” Albert Einstein said. “From there must come America’s voice.” Atomic scientists spoke at Kiwanis clubs, at churches and at synagogues, at schools and libraries. In Kansas alone, they held eight Atomic Age Conferences. And they published One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb, essays by atomic scientists, including Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and by political commentators, including Walter Lippmann. Albert Einstein, in his essay, argued for “denationalization.”11
Against this campaign stood advocates for federal government funding of the new field of computer science, who launched their own publicity campaign, beginning with the well-staged unveiling of ENIAC. It had been difficult to stir up interest. No demonstration of a general-purpose computer could have the drama of an atomic explosion, or even of the 1939 World’s Fair chain-smoking Elektro the Moto-Man. ENIAC was inert. Its vacuum tubes, lit by dim neon bulbs, were barely visible. When the machine was working, there was no real way to see much of anything happening. Mauchly and Eckert prepared press releases and, in advance of a scheduled press conference, tricked up the machine for dramatic effect. Eckert cut Ping-Pong balls in half, wrote numbers on them, and placed them over the tips of the bulbs, so that when the machine was working, the room flashed as the lights flickered and blinked. It blinked fast. The Times gushed, “The ‘Eniac,’ as the new electronic speed marvel is known, virtually eliminates time.”12
The unintended consequences of the elimination of time would be felt for generations. But the great acceleration—the speeding up of every exchange—had begun. And so had the great atomization—the turning of citizens into pieces of data, fed into machines, tabulated, processed, and targeted, as the nation-state began to yield to the data-state.
I.
THE END OF THE WAR marked the dawn of an age of affluence, a wide and deep American prosperity. It led both to a new direction for liberalism—away from an argument for government regulation of business and toward an insistence on individual rights—and to a new form of conservatism, dedicated to the fight against communism and deploying to new ends the rhetoric of freedom.
The origins of postwar prosperity lay in the last legislative act of the New Deal. In June 1944, FDR had signed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, better known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. It created a veterans-only welfare state. The G.I. Bill extended to the sixteen million Americans who served in the war a series of benefits, including a free, four-year college education, zero-down-payment low-interest loans for homes and businesses, and a “readjustment benefit” of twenty dollars a week for up to fifty-two weeks, to allow returning veterans to find work. More than half of eligible veterans—some eight million Americans—took advantage of the G.I. Bill’s educational benefits. Those who did enjoyed average earnings of $10,000–$15,000 more than those who didn’t. They also paid more in taxes. By 1948, the cost of the G.I. Bill constituted 15 percent of the federal budget. But, with rising tax revenues, the G.I. Bill paid for itself almost ten times over. It created a new middle class, changed the face of American colleges and universities, and convinced many Americans that the prospects for economic growth, for each generation’s achieving a standard of living higher than the generation before, might be limitless.13
The G.I. Bill made it possible for a generation of Americans to attend college. In September 1947, three jubilant former servicemen leave a student union at Indiana University, waving their notices of admission. That growth was achieved, in part, by consumer spending, as factories outfitted for wartime production were converted to manufacture consumer goods, from roller skates to color televisions. The idea of the citizen as a consumer, and of spending as an act of citizenship, dates to the 1920s. But in the 1950s, mass consumption became a matter of civic obligation. By buying “the dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before,” Brides magazine told its readers, “you are helping to build greater security for the industries of this country.”14
Critics suggested that the banality and conformity of consumer society had reduced Americans to robots. John Updike despaired: “I drive my car to supermarket, / The way I take is superhigh, / A superlot is where I park it, / And Super Suds are what I buy.”15 Nothing epitomized what critics called the “Packaged Society” so much as Disneyland, an amusement park that had opened in 1955 as a reimagined 1939 World’s Fair, more provincial and more commercial, with a Main Street and a Tomorrowland. In Frontierland, Walt Disney explained, visitors “can return to frontier America, from the Revolutionary Era to the final taming of the great southwest,” riding stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons over dusty trails and boarding the steamship Mark Twain within sight of the park’s trademark turquoise-towered castle, a fairyland that sold itself as “The Happiest Place on Earth.”16
Most of the buying was done by women: housewives and mothers. The home, which had become separated from work during the process of industrialization, became a new kind of political space, in which women met the obligations of citizenship by spending money. Domesticity itself took on a different cast, as changes to the structure of the family that had begun in the Depression and continued during the war were reversed. Before the war, age at first marriage had been rising; after the war, it began falling. The number of children per family had been falling; it began rising. More married women and mothers of young children had been entering the paid labor force; they began leaving it. Having bigger families felt, to many Americans, an urgent matter. “After the Holocaust, we felt obligated to have lots of babies,” one Jewish mother later explained. “But it was easy because everyone was doing it—non-Jews, too.” Expectations of equality between men and women within marriage diminished, as did expectations of political equality. Claims for equal rights for women had been strenuously pressed during the war, but afterwards, they were mostly abandoned. In 1940, the GOP had supporte
d the Equal Rights Amendment (first introduced into Congress in 1923), and in 1944 the Democrats had supported it, too. The measure reached the Senate in 1946, where it won a plurality, but fell short of the two-thirds vote required to send an amendment to the states for ratification.17 It would not pass Congress until 1972, after which an army of housewives, the foot soldiers of the conservative movement, would block its ratification.
The G.I. Bill, for all that it did to build a new middle class, also reproduced and even exacerbated earlier forms of social and economic inequality. Most women who had served in the war were not eligible for benefits; the women’s auxiliary divisions of the branches of the military had been deliberately decreed to be civilian units with an eye toward avoiding providing veterans’ benefits to women, on the assumption that they would be supported by men. After the war, when male veterans flocked to colleges and universities, many schools stopped admitting women, or reduced their number, in order to make more room for men. And, even among veterans, the bill’s benefits were applied unevenly. Some five thousand soldiers and four thousand sailors had been given a “blue discharge” during the war as suspected homosexuals; the VA’s interpretation of that discharge made them ineligible for any G.I. Bill benefits.18
African American veterans were excluded from veterans’ organizations; they faced hostility and violence; and, most significantly, they were barred from taking advantage of the G.I. Bill’s signal benefits, its education and housing provisions. In some states, the American Legion, the most powerful veterans’ association, refused to admit African Americans, and proved unwilling to recognize desegregated associations. Money to go to college was hard to use when most colleges and universities refused to admit African Americans and historically black colleges and universities had a limited number of seats. The University of Pennsylvania had nine thousand students in 1946; only forty-six were black. By 1946, some one hundred thousand black veterans had applied for educational benefits; only one in five had been able to register for college. More than one in four veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill’s home loans, which meant that by 1956, 42 percent of World War II veterans owned their own homes (compared to only 34 percent of nonveterans). But the bill’s easy access to credit and capital was far less available to black veterans. Banks refused to give black veterans loans, and restrictive covenants and redlining meant that much new housing was whites-only.19
Even after the Supreme Court struck down restrictive housing covenants in 1948, the Federal Housing Administration followed a policy of segregation, routinely denying loans to both blacks and Jews. In cities like Chicago and St. Louis and Los Angeles and Detroit, racially restrictive covenants in housing created segregated ghettos where few had existed before the war. Whites got loans, had their housing offers accepted, and moved to the suburbs; blacks were crowded into bounded neighborhoods within the city. Thirteen million new homes were built in the United States during the 1950s; eleven million of them were built in the suburbs. Eighty-three percent of all population growth in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs.20
The New Deal’s unfinished business—its inattention to racial discrimination and racial violence—became the business of the postwar civil rights movement, as new forms of discrimination and the persistence of Jim Crow laws and even of lynching—in 1946 and 1947, black veterans were lynched in Georgia and Louisiana—contributed to a new depth of discontent. As a black corporal from Alabama put it, “I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home.” Langston Hughes, who wrote a regular column for the Chicago Defender, urged black Americans to try to break Jim Crow laws at lunch counters. “Folks, when you go South by train, be sure to eat in the diner,” Hughes wrote. “Even if you are not hungry, eat anyhow—to help establish that right.”21
But where Roosevelt had turned a blind eye, Truman did not. He had grown up in Independence, Missouri, just outside of Kansas City, and worked on the family farm until the First World War, when he saw combat in France. Back in Missouri, he began a slow ascension through the Democratic Party ranks, starting with a county office and rising to the U.S. Senate in 1934. Roosevelt had chosen him as his running mate in 1944 chiefly because he was unobjectionable; neither wing of the Democratic Party was troubled by Truman. He had played virtually no role in White House affairs during his vice presidency, and was little prepared to move into the Oval Office upon Roosevelt’s death. No president had faced a greater trial by fire than the decision that had fallen to Truman over whether or not to use the atomic bomb. Mild-mannered and myopic, Truman had a common touch. Unlike most American presidents, he had neither a college degree nor a law degree. For all his limitations as a president, he had an intuitive sense of the concerns of ordinary Americans. And, from the very beginning of his career, he’d courted black voters and worked closely with black politicians.
Unwilling to ignore Jim Crow, Truman established a commission on civil rights. To Secure These Rights, its 1947 report, demonstrated that a new national consensus had been reached, pointing to a conviction that the federal government does more than prevent the abuse of rights but also secures rights. “From the earliest moment of our history we have believed that every human being has an essential dignity and integrity which must be respected and safeguarded,” read the report. “The United States can no longer countenance these burdens on its common conscience.”22
Consistent with that commitment, Truman made national health insurance his first domestic policy priority. In September 1945, he asked Congress to act on FDR’s Second Bill of Rights by passing what came to be called a Fair Deal. Its centerpiece was a call for universal medical insurance. The time seemed, finally, right, and Truman enjoyed some important sources of bipartisan support, including from Earl Warren, the Republican governor of California. What Truman proposed was a national version of a plan Warren had proposed in California: compulsory insurance funded with a payroll tax. “The health of American children, like their education, should be recognized as a definite public responsibility,” the president said.23
Warren, the son of a Norwegian immigrant railroad worker, a striker who was later murdered, had grown up knowing hardship. After studying political science and the law at Berkeley and serving during the First World War, he’d become California’s attorney general in 1939. In that position, he’d been a strong supporter of the Japanese American internment policy. “If the Japs are released,” Warren had warned, “no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap.” (Warren later publicly expressed pained remorse about this policy and, in a 1972 interview, wept over it.) On the strength of his record as attorney general, Warren had run for governor in 1942. Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter had managed his campaign, which had been notoriously heated. “War-time voters live at an emotional pitch that is anything but normal,” Whitaker had written in his Plan of Campaign. “This must be a campaign that makes people hear the beat of drums and the thunder of bombs—a campaign that stirs and captures the imagination; a campaign that no one who loves California can disregard. This must be A CALL TO ARMS IN DEFENSE OF CALIFORNIA!”24
Warren won, but he didn’t like how he’d won. Just before the election, he fired Whitaker and Baxter. They never forgave him.
Late in 1944, Warren had fallen seriously ill with a kidney infection. His treatment required heroic and costly medical intervention. He began to consider the catastrophic effects a sudden illness could have on a family of limited means. “I came to the conclusion that the only way to remedy this situation was to spread the cost through insurance,” he later wrote. He asked his staff to develop a proposal. After conferring with the California Medical Association, he anticipated no objections from doctors. And so, in his January 1945 State of the State address, Warren announced his plan, a
proposal modeled on the social security system: a 1½ percent withholding of wages would contribute to a statewide compulsory insurance program.25 And then the California Medical Association hired Campaigns, Inc.
Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker, who founded Campaigns, Inc., in California in 1933, attained national prominence at the end of the 1940s through their successful defeat of Truman’s health insurance plan. Earl Warren began his political career as a conservative and ended it as a liberal. Years later, Leone Baxter was asked by a historian what she made of Warren’s seeming transformation. Warren’s own explanation, the historian told Baxter, was this: “I grew up a poor boy myself and I saw the trials and tribulations of getting old without having any income and being sick and not being able to work.” Baxter shot back, “He didn’t see them until that Sunday in 1945.” Then she ended the interview.26
What really changed Earl Warren was Campaigns, Inc. Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that enjoyed wide popular support and torpedoed it. Fifty newspapers initially supported Warren’s plan; Whitaker and Baxter whittled that down to twenty. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” Whitaker liked to say, so they launched a drive for private health insurance. Their “Voluntary Health Insurance Week,” driven by 40,000 inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”27 They printed postcards for voters to stick in the mail: