American Empire
Page 5
Many GIs who had trained in the West or traveled through it on their way to the war found it to their liking and returned to settle after demobilizing. Many civilians who had gone west for defense jobs ended up staying. The civilian population of Alaska went from 73,000 in 1940 to 129,000 in 1950. California’s grew by some two million residents during the war. When the war ended, people continued to flock into the state, helping boost its population from 6.9 million in 1940 to 10.6 million in 1950 (still small compared to the 33.9 million people it housed in 2000).
By 1949, Los Angeles had grown into the third-largest metropolitan region in the country, with a third of the population having arrived in the previous decade. As the center of the motion picture industry (and later the television industry, which largely relocated there from New York), it played an outsize part in establishing the yearnings, fears, role models, and self-understandings of Americans and in projecting images and values of the country across the globe (counterbalancing radio and newspapers, more decentralized media that reinforced local identities). Stars like Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Betty Grable, and Bette Davis were the face of the U.S.A.
Even with the flood of mostly white or African American newcomers, the West still had a much higher proportion of Asian Americans and Native Americans than the rest of the country. In 1950, nearly 69 percent of the country’s 259,397 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders lived in the West (including Alaska and Hawaii), down from 81 percent ten years earlier, in part reflecting the decision of some Japanese Americans not to return to the West following their wartime internment. The West also housed a majority of the nation’s 343,410 Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts, with the largest Indian settlements in Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Large Mexican American populations lived in the Southwest and California, contributing to the polyglot quality that had long characterized the western part of the country.
Ethnic and racial discrimination was as constitutive of the West as the South, at least politically and culturally if not economically. Since the mid-nineteenth century, anti-Asian sentiment had been a binding force among West Coast whites, leading to numerous restrictions on Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino residents and pushing the country to impose extreme limits on immigration from Asia. Discrimination against Mexican Americans was widespread, if not as severe, including, in some areas, segregated schools and public facilities. Native Americans faced a web of discrimination, legal and social, that severely restricted their political participation and contributed to extreme poverty. African Americans found discrimination and segregation increasing during World War II, as their numbers swelled and in defense centers contractors threw up suburban subdivisions for white—and only white—newcomers.
The war enlarged the already massive federal presence in the West. Economic growth in the region, more than elsewhere in the country, depended on government spending. In 1950, 12 percent of employed workers (including military personnel) in the Far West worked for a government agency, compared to 6 percent nationally. The federal government owned huge swaths of western land, including nearly half the land in the Mountain states and nearly three-quarters of Alaska. In Nevada, government agencies owned roughly seven-eighths of the land, just about everything except well-watered pasture or agricultural land.
In the Northwest, cheap power from the federally built Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams (the latter, when completed, the largest structure ever built by man) accelerated industrialization, while associated irrigation projects vastly expanded regional agriculture. In Colorado, California, and Nevada, federal dams and irrigation projects transformed deserts into some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. California’s Imperial Valley, irrigated with water diverted from the Colorado River by the Hoover Dam, thrived because its climate made it possible to get fresh produce to eastern markets even in the winter. In California’s larger Central Valley, during the mid-1930s the federal government took over a water control and irrigation project planned by the state that eventually involved decades of massive investment in dams, pumping stations, levees, and irrigation canals. The water and electricity that flowed from the project turned the Central Valley into a highly mechanized, highly efficient, capital-intensive farmland, where, unlike in the South and some other parts of the country, by the mid-1940s horses and mules had been nearly totally replaced by mechanical equipment, and electricity had been made available nearly everywhere, so that, as a National Geographic Magazine article put it, “Nightfall sees . . . endless farm homes all atwinkle like stars along a man-made Milky Way.”
Katherine Archibald, a young anthropologist who worked in an Oakland shipyard during World War II, wrote that the work done in the shipyards and their workforces drawn from across the country were “a continual reminder of the wartime demand for subordination of cherished localisms to larger social unities.” Regional differences remained substantial after World War II, continuing to shape the political, social, and economic dynamics of the country. But the war diminished them. Military service and the mass migration of workers seeking war jobs opened up horizons for tens of millions of Americans, while breaking down at least some parochial boundaries and assumptions. Exceptional among American wars in having little organized domestic opposition, World War II brought a sense of common purpose that, though far from complete, provided a renewed feeling of confidence and possibility after the long Depression years. Americans could not help but feel, as the war drew to a close, the enormous power that their nation had: military power, economic power, intellectual power, cultural power. As the postwar era began, the United States, as a society and a nation, confronted the question of how it should use its incredible wealth and power to shape the world and reshape itself, and who would make such decisions.
PART I
Pax Americana (1945–1953)
CHAPTER 1
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Power and Politics
Three related issues, each with deep historical roots, structured domestic politics during the years immediately after World War II. First was the proper role of government in ordering society. Second was what rights individuals should have, both in controlling government and more broadly as citizens. Third was how much power, relative to one another, business, labor, and consumers should have over the economy.
World War II brought the Great Depression to an end, but the questions raised by the economic collapse and the New Deal to which it gave birth remained unresolved. Could the country’s system of political economy prevent a return of economic stagnation? How far should the government go in regulating the economy and providing social benefits? Should the redistribution of power and resources that began during the 1930s be continued or rolled back? These questions long remained central to national politics. But within just a few years they began to be answered.
Government
Harry S. Truman discovered upon assuming the presidency, following the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, that the head of the most powerful nation on earth operated with a tiny staff. Only a handful of administrative assistants; a few military aides; appointment, press, and correspondence secretaries; a special counsel; some staff borrowed from executive departments; and the heads of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion and the Bureau of the Budget directly aided the president. In spite of its tremendous expansion during the New Deal and World War II, the federal government remained decentralized and ad hoc.
Until the twentieth century, Americans had had very limited contact with the federal government, especially in peacetime. Most rarely, if ever, interacted with federal agencies, except for the post office. Early in the century, that began to change. Rapid industrialization, disruptive labor conflict, urbanization, and the growth of radical political movements led progressive reformers and even some more conservative politicians to broaden their notion of the responsibility of the state in regulating the economy, mediating social conflict, and promoting minimal standards of
well-being. Still, until the 1930s, the federal government stayed modest in size, administrative capacity, and penetration into the daily routines of American life.
The New Deal changed that, and did so quickly. In 1930, the federal government had 860,000 employees and a budget of $3.3 billion. Ten years later it had 1.5 million employees and spent $9.6 billion. By then, it had become intricately involved in everything from collective bargaining and old-age pensions to housing construction, the arts, and fighting crime. Almost every county in the country had a new public works project—a school, hospital, courthouse, post office, park, road, or dam—funded by Washington.
The swelling size and scope of government came, in large part, in response to the Great Depression. During Roosevelt’s presidency, the federal government hired millions of unemployed; propped up prices and incomes; lent money to keep businesses afloat and homeowners from defaulting on mortgages; and rescued and reformed the banking system. With conservative political and business elites discredited by the economic debacle, reformers had the opportunity to carry out previously blocked plans, including offering subsidies to farmers, creating the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and more actively regulating Wall Street. Under pressure from popular movements of the left and right, Washington established a limited welfare state. The Social Security Act created a national pension system, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs for the dependent poor. The National Labor Relations Act (commonly known as the Wagner Act) protected the right of workers to join a union and engage in collective bargaining. The Fair Labor Standards Act established a national minimum wage and limited working hours.
An electoral realignment accompanied the expansion of the state. By the mid-1930s, a new coalition had emerged in support of Roosevelt. It included immigrants and their children; African Americans; organized labor; big-city Democratic machines; farmers; small businessmen; some corporate leaders; and, at least tacitly, elements of the socialist and communist left (whose influence exceeded their small size). The Roosevelt administration also benefited from solid Democratic control of the South.
Powerful though it was, the New Deal coalition stopped winning major reforms well before the Depression ended. Southern Democrats grew fearful that the extension of federal power into localities would threaten the racial order, while urban politicians fretted that New Deal networks outside their control would undermine local party organizations. As many voters grew disenchanted with the growing size of the government and Roosevelt’s failure to bring about sustained economic recovery, anti–New Deal business leaders mobilized through trade associations and the Republican Party. From 1938 on, a stalemate developed in Congress between two blocs, one of pro–New Deal liberals, largely in the Democratic Party, and the other of anti–New Deal conservatives, which joined Republicans with southern Democrats.
Just as the New Deal reached its seeming limits, war brought a further expansion of the state. In 1945, the federal government spent ten times what it had in 1939. While fighting raged across the globe, federal presence deepened in everyday life, as Washington regulated prices and wages; rationed consumer goods; controlled transportation; allocated raw materials; built factories, pipelines, and military bases; carried out a military draft; and held, without trial, thousands of citizens in internment camps.
To finance the swollen state sector, Washington undertook massive borrowing and revamped the tax system. Prior to the war, only the wealthy paid income taxes. During it, Congress drastically lowered the cutoff for income tax exemption, so that middle- and working-class families had to pay federal taxes as well. Filing income tax returns became a yearly national ritual, reminding income earners of the extent and cost of federal power.
Federal growth evoked less controversy during World War II than during the New Deal, since the state expanded to wage a war that most Americans supported. Still, the backlash against the New Deal continued. Business leaders, widely blamed for the economic ills of the 1930s, found their social standing and political influence reelevated, as the Roosevelt administration turned to them to lead the defense mobilization. By contrast, reformers found their influence diminished by the priority given to war needs and an increasingly conservative Congress. The union movement provided something of a countervailing force, growing during the war to 14.7 million members, from 10.5 million before its start, but, committed to military victory, it generally cooperated with government efforts to maximize production and avoid disruptive disputes.
Successful though it was, the wartime mobilization led intellectuals, political activists, and government insiders to rethink the role of government. Many felt that the wartime federal bureaucracy had proved to be an inefficient mechanism for controlling the economy, riven as it was by battles over turf and policy, and generating as it did widespread grumbling about regulations and restrictions. But the expansion of the federal spending had had a miraculous effect on the economy. During the war, the GNP soared from $91 billion to $166 billion. Personal savings reached $37 billion in 1944, a national nest egg that financed a postwar spending spree. With vast investment in capital equipment and the creation of fifteen million new jobs, the United States simultaneously supplied its twelve million soldiers and sailors with arms and equipment; sent shipload after shipload of goods to its allies; and still produced enough consumer items to allow a substantial improvement in the standard of living.
Many New Deal reformers concluded from this experience that fiscal policy, rather than a further expansion of government institutions or a redistribution of wealth, provided the best means of promoting social well-being. Stimulating economic growth through government spending held the promise of keeping employment high and downturns shallow without a large, intrusive federal bureaucracy, avoiding the managerial and political problems evident during the New Deal and the war. Demand stimulation might produce budget deficits, but the wartime experience led many economists and politicians to shed their fears of unbalanced budgets, recognizing that deficit spending, on a scale far beyond what the New Deal engaged in, had led to unprecedented economic growth.
Liberals, leftists, and labor leaders by no means entirely abandoned ideas for extending the New Deal. As the war drew to an end, they promoted sweeping political programs that in various ways combined fiscal management of the economy, expanded social welfare benefits, and direct state spending. Many borrowed language from President Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, in which he argued that since “individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” the country needed “a second Bill of Rights” that would guarantee all Americans a right to “a useful and remunerative job,” “a decent home,” “adequate medical care,” and “a good education.” Typical was the “People’s Program” put forth in 1944 by the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO-PAC), the political arm of one of the two major union federations. It called for full employment at fair wages, federal aid to education, large-scale public housing construction, federally sponsored health insurance, continued rent and price controls, continued agricultural price supports, and compensatory public works spending when the economy softened.
Some of the liberal proposals took specific legislative form. In 1943, Congressman John Dingell and Senators Robert F. Wagner and James E. Murray introduced a bill to expand the Social Security system to include medical, hospitalization, and disability insurance; improve existing benefits; and create a national network of government-run employment offices. Murray also sponsored a bill to set up a Missouri Valley Authority, the first of what some New Dealers hoped would be a series of new Tennessee Valley Authorities, which would tame rivers, create jobs and electricity, and bring economic and social planning to large sections of the country. To address a severe housing shortage, Wagner joined with Democratic senator Allen J. Ellender and Republican senator Robert Taft to propose a massive expansion of federal funding for public housing and slum clearance.
These liberal proposals received extensive publicity and sparked widespread debate, but, at least in Washington, their backers had little success in getting legislation passed. The necessities of war and the revival of business pushed the political pendulum to the right. The war years hardened an antistatism among conservatives that already had crystallized in their opposition to the New Deal. Looking beyond the borders, conservative intellectuals—and some liberals, too—concluded that fascist and communist dictatorships revealed the threat to individual liberty from any expansion of state power. Some, like Friedrich von Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, argued that only by abandoning state planning and economic regulation for a strictly free-market economy could liberty be preserved, a view that grew increasingly influential in the decades to come.