Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  For it turned out that there were few limitations to the ingenuity of American and Soviet scientists in devising weapons of horror. The rulers of each country, determined not to be vulnerable to blackmail (‘Do as I say or I’ll nuke you!’), poured out money and resources of all kinds upon their research establishments, and diplomacy was never able to catch up: prospects for agreed disarmament always lagged behind the latest devices. So the arsenals of terror filled up to bursting point, and the world grew steadily more dangerous, especially as lesser powers began to equip themselves atomically. Britain and France developed small but expensive nuclear armouries in order to convince themselves that they were still great powers; China armed later, in order to safeguard the balance of power in Asia; later still, other countries began to toy with the idea of atoms. The necessary technology grew cheaper and cheaper, more and more generally available; the moral sense dulled. The prospects of the nations darkened. Against these considerations can only be set the fact that so great was the fear of nuclear war that governments with the power to wage it behaved with great circumspection; crises which in earlier ages would almost certainly have brought on armed conflict were resolved peaceably; the uneasy restraint of the immediate post-war years persisted. It was a frail guarantee of the human future; but it held.

  These developments foreclosed many choices for the Americans. Never again would they be able to rely, as they always had, on the wide oceans to keep them reasonably safe from attack, the less so as missile weaponry (another technological legacy of the Second World War) developed rapidly. Unless they felt they could trust Stalin and his successors not to abuse their opportunities (few Americans after 1948 were inclined to run that risk) they would have to maintain their alliances and their armed forces and continue in the arms race they had begun. Negotiated disarmament would probably remain a desirable but very distant goal. Never again could American diplomacy be idle; the responsibilities of great power burdened the country inescapably.

  As a result the position of the army, navy and air force in American life changed permanently. Traditionally, the armed forces had never counted for much in peacetime, either with the politicians or the public. Now, as alarm about the Soviet Union mounted, so did the leverage of the generals and admirals. They quickly grasped that the best way of increasing the defence budget, and hence their own influence, was by sounding the alarm of war. They struck up alliances with industrialists (especially aircraft manufacturers) who were eager for orders. They quarrelled bitterly among themselves about the allocation of funds: navy against air force, both against the army. In 1948 the Director of the Budget commented that ‘the idea of turning over custody of atomic bombs to these competing, jealous, insubordinate services, fighting for position with each other, is a terrible prospect.’ But no Budget Director, no Secretary of Defense, no President, was ever able to discipline them for long: they had too many friends and clients.

  The purely economic effects of the arms race were equally striking. For a quarter of a century (until the Nixon administration) a conscript army was maintained, much of it abroad, in such places as West Germany, Japan and South Korea. Great fleets patrolled the seas, the planes of the Strategic Air Command were constantly in the air, even after the rise of rocketry made them obsolescent, billions of dollars were spent on maintaining all these forces, on arming them and on developing new weapons for them. These expenditures remade the industrial map of the United States. Weapons research created new employment in a manner that left the memory of New Deal experiments in public expenditure far behind. Defence establishments of all kinds were allocated to regions which private enterprise might have left to stagnate: for example, the committees of Congress being usually dominated by elderly veterans of the Democratic South, their states and districts got the larger part of the federal largesse that was now flowing. Georgia, Texas and Florida began to bloom under a rain of dollars. Vast areas of New Mexico and Arizona were set aside for weapons testing. Where defence went, other industries and private investments followed: soon the economic gap between the South and the rest of the Union, which had endured since the Civil War, began to close, and the South-West became the most rapidly growing part of the country (South and South-West together were eventually known by a new name, ‘the Sun Belt’). California was the chief beneficiary of this new movement. Rich in good land, in oil, in minerals, and with a marvellous climate, it became the leader in the new high-technology industries. By 1960 it was outstripping New York and becoming the most populous state in the Union.

  Yet even this result of the atomic bomb was not wholly good, for it created vast new interests which were conservative in outlook and, being based on arms expenditure, essentially militaristic. This was a quite unprecedented element in American society. Even if true peace returned there would be resistance in the Sun Belt to cuts in spending for defence; dollar-minded patriotism would see every move to achieve an understanding with America’s foreign rivals as dangerous trifling with the country’s safety; the prosperous clients of the warfare state would develop a certain indifference to the distresses of other parts of the country; and though the immense wealth generated would make life amazingly comfortable for most of the citizens, and would be spent lavishly on public enterprises, so that California, for example, was soon crowded with notable universities growing rich on contracts with the U S Defense Department, and possessed the most generous welfare arrangements in the world, nevertheless the distribution of wealth was still highly unequal. There were vast areas of indifferent housing in Los Angeles, increasingly inhabited by poor blacks. The middle classes, for all their public spirit, achieved a culture that was at best shallow and at worst vulgarly corrupting. The Golden State had always been a haven for exotic religions. In the new era many of them became mass affairs, peddling doubtful comforts to the gullible. These new cults had none of the grim frontier strength of primitive Mormonism; they were tailored, rather, to a consumer society with a taste for cheap salvation.

  In the 1940s none of this could be foreseen. America stood almost alone in a ruined world. Her good luck was indeed astonishing, and later events become a little more comprehensible if we assume that, consciously or not, many Americans felt uneasy, or even guilty, about being so uniquely lucky. Of course they told themselves and everybody else that their success was the reward of virtue. Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune magazines, had complacently proclaimed the opening of ‘the American century’ while the war was still being fought. The ‘American Way of Life’ (another cliché of the period) was vindicated with every bottle of Coca-Cola sold. Nevertheless, Americans were often intensely apprehensive about the future. Meantime the post-war depression which everyone had expected did not occur. Millions of veterans returning from the war were only anxious to settle down and raise families. Their demands for housing, medical care, college education, cars, washing-machines and well-paid employment were transmitted to the federal government through the American Legion, the Veterans’ Administration and other such bodies; Washington showed itself anxious to oblige by making large funds available, and thus a huge consumer boom was stimulated.3 It was assisted by the fact that during the war the Office of Price Administration had largely succeeded in holding down prices while wages rose and went into savings, for there were then few goods available for consumer purchase. Now, as industry returned to peacetime production and began to pour out goods, it was discovered that the masses had the money to buy them. Nor did the good times cease (though they occasionally faltered) when the impetus of demobilization was exhausted: between 1947 and 1960 personal disposable income went up, in real terms, by 17 per cent, while the population increased from 141 million to 181 million. A steadily expanding market, a steadily improving standard of living for all and only trifling inflation seemed to be the new law of nature. Encouraged by the prospect of an endless boom, moneylenders grew amazingly confident. By the mid-fifties they were regularly lending former GIs the entire purchase price of houses, and most ca
rs were bought on credit – $100 down and three years to pay. All this stimulated the boom still more. American prosperity became the wonder of the world. In the mid-forties, while Europe starved and (in the winter of 1947) froze; while revolution marched across China, which had not known peace for over thirty years; while the British Empire in India came to an end amid great bloodshed; while Stalin prepared to consolidate his new empire in Eastern Europe by the tried methods of police terror; and while dictatorships rose and fell as usual in Latin America, the citizens of the United States began to enjoy a generally diffused well-being which eclipsed even the experiences of the mid-twenties.

  Yet the rest of the world could not be allowed to go hang. The American people and government had seen what that led to and were determined to shoulder their responsibilities – rather too determined, it emerged.

  Matters were most nearly straightforward in the Far East, except (a large exception) for the Chinese puzzle. Since the United States had undoubtedly played much the greatest part against Japan, it felt free to exclude all its allies from any part in the post-war settlement. The Japanese, who had never been conquered before, showed themselves willing to adopt the ways of their conquerors, so General Mac Arthur, who had received their surrender, set out to teach them democracy. Surprisingly, given the General’s autocratic temperament, the experiment turned out excellently. Mac-Arthur had a deep understanding of what the historical moment required of his country and repudiated the imperialist tradition. America would lose a golden opportunity, he said, if she used her immense new influence ‘in an imperialistic manner, or for the sole purpose of commercial advantage… but if our influence and our strength are expressed in terms of essential liberalism, we shall have the friendship and the co-operation of the Asiatic peoples far into the future’. Time would eventually destroy these hopes; but meanwhile Mac Arthur ruled with huge success. He comported himself very much as a new Shogun (the Mikado Hirohito had kept his title but been shorn of his divinity and political power) and at his command the Japanese set about turning themselves into democrats and rebuilding their shattered country. They were startlingly successful in both respects, to the gratification of the Americans. Reconciliation was hastened by the triumph of the communists in China in 1949, an event equally displeasing to the Japanese and the United States, and by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. A formal peace treaty was negotiated, and signed in September 1951, at the same time as one committing the Americans to undertake the defence of Japan against any foe, since the Japanese were forbidden to have any armed forces themselves.

  No such happy outcome could be expected in Europe, if only because Germany was now divided into two parts. This was a quite unintended result of the war, and came about because Russia and her allies found it impossible to agree on the government of the defeated country. It was possible to set up a tribunal at Nuremberg which tried and sentenced the surviving Nazi leaders; all other matters were divisive. Stalin was determined to eliminate all possibility of a repetition of the 1941 attack on Russia and to squeeze the utmost in reparations out of the Germans. Unfortunately the reparations policy, unacceptable to Western statesmen on economic grounds (they clearly remembered what trouble reparations had caused between the wars), soon became indistinguishable from one of wholesale plunder; and Soviet security seemed to demand the permanent subjugation of Germany and the establishment by brutal means of communist governments, backed by the Red Army, everywhere else. In Central Europe only Czechoslovakia held out for a time; in South-Eastern Europe, only Greece – and there a civil war was raging between the government and communist guerrillas.

  Policy-makers in Washington watched these developments with growing indignation. The truculent diplomatic conduct of the Soviet government did nothing to better international relations. Molotov would soon become notorious for always saying ‘nyet’ to any Western proposal, and in this way a Russian word entered the English language. President Truman stated privately that he was tired of ‘babying the Soviets’. And the surest friends of the United States were deeply alarmed, in the late forties, by Soviet conduct. The British did not fear a communist coup d’état in their own country, but the consequences of a communist takeover in Italy, France and West Germany would have been most unpleasant to them, for Europe would thus have been united under the hegemony of a single aggressive power – the thing which British policy had worked and fought so hard for so long to prevent. To French democrats the issue was even more pressing. Having just endured the horrors of one occupation and one sort of collaboration they were unwilling to risk another which was likely to be more permanent. France’s Communist party was notoriously subservient to Moscow: it could not be trusted to respect either French liberties or French diplomatic interests. Italy, a former enemy, might not have won a hearing, even though there were millions of Italian-Americans in the United States, but for the existence of the papacy. Pius XII had never seen fit to take the lead in opposition to Nazism or fascism; but he exerted his authority and influence to the full in opposing Stalinist communism. Poland, the most Catholic country in northern Europe, had been swallowed up: Italy must not go the same way.

  All these fears found expression in Winston Churchill’s celebrated speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, which announced to the world, and to President Truman (who was sitting on the platform behind him and had read the address beforehand), that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent’. Russia, through the agency of Communist parties and fifth columnists everywhere, was trying to destroy Christian civilization. She must be resisted by a permanent alliance of the staunch English-speaking peoples – the United States, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth.4 This bellicose message was not well received in all quarters, but it chimed in very well with the contingencies of American domestic politics.

  The Republican party had now been excluded from national power for nearly fourteen years. It could not regain the Presidency before 1948, but meantime there were the Congressional elections of 1946 to look forward to. Working in the Republicans’ favour were the inevitable reaction against the party of the war which had toppled Churchill in Britain and the long-flowing conservative tide which had set in in 1938. But they needed a cry, or thought they did, and the slogans of anti-communism were just the right sort of thing. They were familiar, from the days of the Red Scare; Stalin’s actions made them plausible; and the Yalta agreements, which had been presented as such a triumph of Soviet-American friendship, such a proof of the special understanding between FDR and Uncle Joe, made the Democrats vulnerable. For it was becoming gospel on the Right that at Yalta vital national interests had been given away, either in treachery or folly.

  In the event, the Republicans did extremely well, regaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1930. It is doubtful if their general victory owed much to the anti-communist cry: the process of adjustment from war to peace was proving painful, price controls had been lifted and as a result the cost of living was galloping upwards; but here and there were signs of how the wind was setting. In California a returning serviceman, Richard Milhous Nixon (1913 – 94), was elected to the House of Representatives, having waged an unscrupulous campaign insinuating that his opponent was a secret communist. He was not unique.

  The Truman administration had to take account of these signs. It was entering on a very difficult period. The outstanding figure in the government was now General Marshall, Army Chief of Staff throughout the war, recently returned from an unsuccessful mission to China, where he had hoped to reconcile Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Tse-tung and bring peace to that unhappy country. In January 1947 he had been appointed Secretary of State. His chief assistant was Dean Acheson, an able lawyer of long Washington experience. President Truman himself was proving to be, as Acheson later called him, ‘the captain with the mighty heart’. All three were men of compassion, courage and (within the limits of their humanity) wisdom. Europe was founderin
g in the throes of the worst winter in living memory. If the victory over Hitler was to be worth anything, the peoples of that continent must first be rescued from starvation, and next put on the road to a renewal of strength and hope. Otherwise the whole of society might collapse for good, or again succumb to dictatorship. And if the rich, well-fed, well-organized Americans stood by and simply watched disaster happen, they would never be forgiven, nor deserve to be. A programme of economic aid must be devised; but how was a discredited Democratic administration, which everyone expected to be defeated in the next Presidential election, to get such a programme through the Republican Congress?

  The answer was, by a series of delicate strokes. Truman first asked Congress for a grant of $350 million for the prevention of starvation. Then, in March, Britain having stated that she could no longer bear the burden of propping up the Greek and Turkish governments against the threat of Soviet-backed communist insurgency or economic collapse (it being as much as the British could do to keep themselves warm for a few hours each day), the President appeared before a joint session of Congress to say that ‘it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’ (what later became known as the Truman Doctrine) and to ask for Congressional authorization for aid to Greece and Turkey in the form of money, trained personnel, commodities, supplies and equipment. Senator Taft warned in vain against this renewed abandonment of isolationism: Senator Vandenberg of Michigan, a somewhat vacuous Republican whom the Roosevelt and Truman administrations had been cultivating for years, came out in support of the proposals, which became law in May. But help to Greece and Turkey left Western Europe still prostrate. General Marshall, returning from a fruitless visit to Moscow, had seen for himself the vast desolation. The health of the American economy needed a healthy Europe for mutual trade. It was now the unanimous view of the administration that the Soviet Union was bent on expansion at all costs, and meant cunningly to exploit the opportunity to carry communism as far as the English Channel. Such fiendish plots must be checked. So on 5 June 1947 General Marshall made a celebrated speech at Harvard. ‘Our policy is directed against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos,’ he said. ‘Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.’ He invited proposals from Europe, promising a generous response. The fish rose to the bait – non-communist Europe expressed enthusiastic interest and deep appreciation, and soon had put together a programme to present to the United States which set the recovery campaign off to a good start and meant that, when all ended happily, the programme would be known forever by Marshall’s name. Senator Vandenberg rallied to the flag again. Dean Acheson, who had temporarily left the administration, led a Citizens’ Committee for the Marshall Plan, which by dint of endless speechifying up and down the country mustered widespread support for the programme. Acheson was greatly helped by Stalin’s refusal to take part, or to allow his East European puppet governments to take part either; and in February 1948 the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. These developments made the administration’s insistence that the Marshall Plan was an anti-communist measure, and an urgent one too, all the more convincing, and unhappily most Americans – at any rate, most Republicans – were more impressed by anti-communist arguments than by suggestions that it might not be altogether moral to leave America’s recent allies to starve to death, or even that it might not be economically prudent to do nothing to rescue the world economy, now more prostrated than it had been during the Depression. So it would have been a grave embarrassment had the Soviet Union joined the programme; it did nothing of the kind, the plan was voted through Congress by comfortable majorities, and in the end $13,000,000,000 was made available to fund it. Presently a vast flood of American goods poured eastwards, and the rebuilding of Europe got under way at last.