As the first decade of the twenty-first century ended, the American empire was on the decline. Wars being fought after years of sacrifice, without clear purpose or victory, had sapped the country’s finances and global standing. The economy no longer provided enough jobs or opportunities to maintain the living standards that had once been widely shared. In manufacturing, infrastructure, and education, the United States no longer led other industrial and industrializing countries, and in some respects lagged way behind. A small-minded, fractious political system proved unable to seize the moment or chart the future. The challenge of reinvention once again faced the nation.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Eric Foner for asking me to write this volume. Though there were times when I wondered what I was thinking when I agreed to take it on, among the pleasures it provided was the opportunity to work with him again. I benefited enormously from his support, advice, and remarkable knowledge of American history. I also valued the opportunity to work again, after a very long interlude, with Wendy Wolf. She and Kevin Doughten were terrific editors. Thanks, too, to Brittney Ross, Roland Ottewell, and the whole staff at Viking Penguin.
Steve Fraser and David Nasaw generously agreed to read the full manuscript of this long volume, for which I am greatly appreciative. Their comments and suggestions proved invaluable and helped shape the final form of the book. Steve and I have collaborated on so many projects and discussed history (and everything else) so many times since our first day as graduate students that his ideas and ways of thinking have become deeply intertwined with my own.
Betsy Blackmar, Jack Metzgar, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Gilda Zwerman read substantial portions of the manuscript and provided extremely valuable criticism and suggestions, for which I am grateful. So did members of my family, Deborah Bell, Julia Bell, and Lena Bell, whose sage advice and remarkable tolerance were a great gift, in this project as in everything else. Mark Levinson and Mark Naison steered me to sources I otherwise would not have known.
Over the years I worked on this book I had valuable research assistance from doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center. I want to thank Matthew Cotter, Edwin Tucker, Amy Van Natter, Paul Naish, Chad Turner, Vanessa Weller, John Blanton, and Katherine Uva for all their help.
I have the privilege of working for a public university that takes seriously its mission to educate “the children of the whole people.” It has given me the opportunity to teach at every level, from night classes for working people returning to school after many years to doctoral courses for gifted students from around the world. For the faculty at the City University of New York, chronic underfunding means that their working lives are often overburdened and their time for research and writing constrained. I thank the colleagues and administrators who made it possible for me to complete this book, especially William P. Kelly, president of the Graduate Center; James L. Muyskens, president of Queens College; Frank Warren, chairman of the Queens College History Department; and Gregory Mantsios, director of the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies.
As a synthetic study, American Empire rests on the work of hundreds of other scholars and writers. While the interpretations are my own, the information and ideas that inform this book are the product of a collective endeavor, across time and discipline, to understand the American past. Without the work of the authors cited in the bibliography, this book could not exist. To them I owe the greatest acknowledgment.
Bibliography
American Empire rests on the work of scholars, journalists, writers, and public figures, as listed below. In the interest of space, books and articles generally are cited only in connection with the chapter for which they were most important. With some exceptions, statistical sources and individual newspaper articles are not listed, again because of the constraint of space. Primary sources that proved exceptionally valuable include various editions of the Statistical Abstract of the United States and Historical Statistics of the United States; the online databases maintained by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Census Bureau; and the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Also valuable were articles in the Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, New York Times, Time, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
Introduction
For the idea of empire and its application to the United States, see William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts About an Alternative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); William K. Tabb, “Imperialism: In Tribute to Harry Magdoff,” Monthly Review 58 (March 2007): 26–37.
Prologue: E Pluribus Unum
For surveys of the physical, social, and political landscape, see George R. Stewart, U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953); Henry G. Alsberg, ed., The American Guide (New York: Hastings House, 1949); John Gunther, Inside U.S.A. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947); Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics, 2nd ed., revised (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956); Alfred J. Wright, United States and Canada: An Economic Geography (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948); David L. Rigby, “Urban and Regional Restructuring in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century,” in American Place/American Space: Geographies of the Contemporary United States, ed. John A. Agnew and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002); Carol E. Heim, “Structural Changes: Regional and Urban,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
For the population makeup, see Donald J. Bogue, The Population of the United States (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959); Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century: Census 2000 Special Reports (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002); Herbert S. Klein, A Population History of the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
For the impact of the New Deal and World War II, see William E. Leuchenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972).
For the Midwest, see James H. Madison, ed., Heartland: Comparative Histories of the Midwestern States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Federal Writers’ Project, North Dakota: A Guide to the Northern Prairie State, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950); Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Meridel Le Sueur, North Star Country (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945); Eric Thane, High Border Country (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1942); James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “The Transformation of Northern Agriculture, 1910–1990,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, ed. Engerman and Gallman.
For Fordism and the automobile industry, see David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Works Projects Administration, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1948); Robert Asher and Ronald Edsforth, eds., Autowork (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Steve Jeffreys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ronald Edsforth, Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1987); Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York: Adama Books, 1984).
For the midwestern population and racial and ethnic tensions, see Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Dionicio Nodín Valdés, Barrios Norteños: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
For the Northeast and its forms of industrialization, see Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001); George W. Long, “Rhode Island, Modern City-State,” National Geographic Magazine 94 (August 1948): 137–70; Philip Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity: Flexible Production and American Industrialization, 1880–1930,” Business History Review 65 (Spring 1991): 27–90; Russell F. Weigley, ed., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York: Norton, 1982); Philip Scranton and Walter Licht, Work Sights: Industrial Philadelphia, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983).
For the financial industry, see David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002); Sidney M. Robbins and Nestor E. Terleckyj with the collaboration of Ira O. Scott Jr., Money Metropolis: A Locational Study of Financial Activities in the New York Region (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Eugene N. White, “Banking and Finance in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, ed. Engerman and Gallman.
For race, ethnicity, and discrimination in the Northeast, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967); Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951); Deborah Dash Moore, G.I. Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
For the South, see Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Frederick Simpich, “Arkansas Rolls Up Its Sleeves,” National Geographic Magazine 90 (September 1946): 273–312; Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981); Douglas Flamming, Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884–1984 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
For race relations in the South, see William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001); Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (New York: Crown, 2004); Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994).
For race relations nationally, see Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1959); J. Robert Moskin, The U.S. Marine Corps Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977); Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and the Law—an American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
For the impact of World War II on the South, see Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lee E. Williams II, Post-War Riots in America, 1919 and 1946: How the Pressure of War Exacerbated American Urban Tensions to the Breaking Point (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991); Neil R. McMillen, ed., Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
For energy use and the oil industry, see [U.S.] Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review 2001 (Washington, DC: Department of Energy, 2001); Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
For the Southwest, see Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 1993); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Frederick Simpich, “Louisiana Trades with the World,” National Geographic Magazine 92 (December 1947): 705–38; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).
For the West, see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Stephen Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Fern Chandonnet, ed., Alaska at War, 1941–1945: The Forgotten War Remembered (Anchorage: Alaska at War Committee, 1995); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); T. M. Sell, Wings of Power: Boeing and the Politics of Growth in the Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Katherine Archibald, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947); Leo A. Borah, “Oregon Finds New Riches,” National Geographic Magazine 90 (December 1946): 681–720; W. Robert Moore, “Nevada, Desert Treasure House,” National Geographic Magazine 90 (January 1946): 1–38; Frederick Simpich, “More Water for California’s Great Central Valley,” National Geographic Magazine 90 (November 1946): 645–63.
Chapter 1: Power and Politics
For Harry Truman, see Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: Norton, 1977); Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); Bert Cochran, Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1973); Donald R. McCoy, The Presidency of Harry S. Truman (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984); David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
For the impact of the New Deal and World War II, see Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620–the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); Michael Edelstein, “War and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000
); Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Population Characteristics, series P-20, no. 14, Internal Migration in the United States: April 1940 to April 1947 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1948).
For the way the wartime experience changed thinking about the state, see Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Knopf, 1995); Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert M. Collins, More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
For plans to expand the New Deal, see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941–1948 (New York: Free Press, 1973); Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991).
For opposition to New Deal expansion, see Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal Through the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, “Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress, 1933–1950,” Political Science Quarterly 108 (Summer 1993): 283–306; Louis Galambos, “The U.S. Corporate Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, ed. Engerman and Gallman.
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