American Empire Read online

  Other titles in the Penguin History of the United States series

  American Colonies

  Alan Taylor

  AMERICAN

  EMPIRE

  The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home 1945–2000

  JOSHUA B. FREEMAN

  The Penguin History of the United States

  Eric Foner, Series Editor

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Joshua B. Freeman, 2012

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Freeman, Joshua Benjamin.

  American empire, 1945–2000 : the rise of a global power, the democratic revolution at home / Joshua Freeman.

  p. cm. — (Penguin history of the United States ; v. 5)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-101-58377-7

  1. United States—History—1945– 2. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 3. United States—Politics and government—1989– 4. United States—Economic conditions—1945– 5. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989. 6. United States—Foreign relations—1989– I. Title.

  E741.F69 2012

  973.92—dc23 2011049263

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For Debbie, Julia, and Lena

  Contents

  Other Titles in the Penguin History of the United States Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  PART I

  Pax Americana (1945–1953)

  1. Power and Politics

  2. Cold War

  3. Stalemate in Washington

  4. National Security State

  PART II

  The High Tide of Liberal Democracy (1954–1974)

  5. Suburban Nation

  6. “We the Union Army”

  7. “Hour of Maximum Danger”

  8. The Democratic Revolution

  9. Apocalypse Now

  10. Sixties to Seventies, Dreams to Nightmares

  11. The End of the American Century

  PART III

  The Resurrection of Corporate Capitalism (1975–1989)

  12. The Landscape of Decline

  13. The Politics of Stagnation

  14. The Corporate Revolution

  15. The Reagan Revolution

  16. Cold War Redux

  PART IV

  The New World Order (1990–2000)

  17. “I’m Running Out of Demons”

  18. Triangulation

  19. Living Large

  Epilogue: America After 9/11

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  From the end of World War II to the start of the twenty-first century, the United States was at its peak of power, as dominant in the world, in its own way, as Great Britain and Rome had been at the height of their empires. Economically and militarily it far exceeded all its rivals. Politically and culturally it had enormous influence across the world. Its language and cultural references became as close to a global lingua franca as there was. Its scientific and technological achievements were unmatched.

  This book tells the story of the United States during those years. It examines the political and economic structures of the country, daily life, regional and national culture, and the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. In doing so, it tries to explain why the United States took the particular path of development it did. The extraordinary accomplishments of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century brought bounty and freedom to hundreds of millions of Americans but never fully realized the widespread hopes at the end of World War II for a more peaceful world and more equitable society. The prolonged warfare, fearfulness, and economic troubles of the early twenty-first century owe more than a little to decisions made in the earlier epoch.

  In the decades after World War II, Americans rarely spoke of empire or imperialism, especially in relation to their own society. Once common terms, widely used by both supporters and critics of policies meant to achieve control over foreign lands, by the mid-twentieth century they had come to be seen as archaic and irrelevant to a world of decolonization and cold war. Until the turn of the new millennium, only on the political left during the Vietnam era did imperialism get revived as a way of understanding the United States. The notion of the United States as an empire reentered political discussion soon before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and much more so after them, among those who saw American imperialism as good for the world as well as among those who opposed it.

  Empire comes in many forms, not just the annexation of territory, the Roman practice, or the creation of colonies, the operating mode of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and other European powers. At its heart, empire involves asserting influence and control over places, people, resources, and trade outside the original boundaries of a national entity. While empires almost always involve at least some use of military force, or the threat of its use, power can be exerted in many ways. Political, economic, cultural, and ideological influence can be as important to empire as ships, planes, and guns. After World War II, the United States did not seek to conquer territory or establish colonies, one reason its citizens rarely thought of it as an empire. But through treaties and alliances, investment and trade, Coca-Cola and rock and roll, Peace Corps volunteers and CIA agents, as well as bombers and infantry, the United States established itself as the most powerful human force on the planet. The American empire shaped the flow of history far from the borders of the United States, just as empire shaped history within them.

  An American watching a World War II–era movie about the United States at the end of the twentieth century would have seen a country that in many respects did not look, sound, or seem radically different from the one she or he inhabited. Political and social continuities between World War II and the end of the century would have made it easy to ignore or minimize how much the contours of the country had changed during those fifty-five years (a quarter of the history of the United States to tha
t point in time). From 132 million people in 1940, the population had more than doubled to 281 million. Places that had been nearly empty when the war ended came to house millions of Americans in communities with physical and cultural configurations unknown a half century earlier. Immigration had brought unprecedented diversity to the population. Technology had changed the way people lived, worked, and entertained themselves.

  Within enduring social and legal structures—as a continuous constitutional government, the United States has few peers in longevity—America has always been an extraordinarily dynamic society. France, Germany, Russia, and China underwent multiple revolutions, which brought into being new political regimes and fundamental social changes; the United States experienced only one deep disjuncture, the Civil War, and even the aftermath of that traumatic event was resolved within the existing constitutional framework. But the United States has had a series of moments of rapid change that might be thought of as contained revolutions, transformations of society and daily life that had pervasive effects without leading to rupture. Between World War II and the twenty-first century, the country was shaped and reshaped by the militarization of American life that came with the Cold War; the democratization of society set in motion by the African American freedom struggle; the cultural changes that rippled forward from the 1960s; the redefinition of gender roles; the corporate restructuring of the economy in the 1970s and 1980s; and the rise of political conservatism that began at the same time.

  Given the size and diversity of the United States and the relatively long period this book covers compared to the usual temporal units into which American history is divided—“Jacksonian America” or “the Progressive Era”—any effort to find defining patterns of change necessarily involves simplification and selective focus. But within the vast array of events, private and public, that make up the history of the post–World War II era, several large-scale arcs stand out that help map the distance the country traveled between the celebration when World War II ended and the shock and mourning five and a half decades later when it suffered the first major attack on its territory since Pearl Harbor.

  One of the great stories of U.S. history, and a framing theme of this book, is the long period of sustained economic growth after World War II. When the war ended, the country, though rich by historical and world measures, had a standard of living far below what it would be a few decades later. Most families had little discretion in how they lived or spent their money, needing all their income and energy to get from one week to the next. Limited resources and parochial cultures meant circumscribed lives, rooted in local social worlds, with minimal interaction with people and places even a modest distance away.

  Prolonged economic growth brought qualitative change. Rising national and personal incomes allowed people to live more comfortable, secure, and mobile lives than ever before. Prosperity diminished regional differences and supported an expansive notion of state function, including the ongoing projection of American power abroad. As Americans experienced a quarter century of prosperity, after a decade and a half of depression and war, they developed capacious notions of what was possible for themselves and their country, and in myriad ways tried to realize them.

  To the surprise and alarm of most Americans, the robust economy of the postwar years came to a crashing halt during the 1970s, as the national and international arrangements that had brought postwar prosperity began to break down. When growth resumed, it did so unevenly, interrupted by periods of economic difficulty and marked by rising economic inequality. Some industries and regions that had been mainstays of the country for a century or more never revived. Others led the way into a new gilded age, in which astounding fortunes were seemingly conjured out of thin air, while much of the population found itself struggling just to maintain what it had. The changes in the economy that occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s help explain many of the cultural and political developments of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

  A second defining development during the half century after World War II was a multifaceted struggle to make democracy more meaningful. The United States fought World War II, as it has fought most of its wars, in the name of democracy. But democracy had a very different meaning at that time than it would when the century ended. In the middle of the twentieth century, millions of Americans were denied basic citizenship rights. Formal political power was much less evenly distributed than it later would be, individual rights far less robust, and openly discriminatory rules and practices widespread. Who could vote, how legislatures were constituted, who could use which public facilities, who was allowed to work in which kind of job, and how the criminal justice system operated all were very different in the mid-1940s than they would be a generation later. In businesses, families, schools, and churches, on playing fields and in communities, the hierarchies of power and opportunity were structured by race, sex, religion, and ethnicity. Authority was wielded by fewer hands, with fewer challenges and less consultation, than we now take for granted.

  The postwar struggle by African Americans for freedom, rights, and equality catalyzed a democratic revolution that transformed the United States and echoed around the world. Expanded notions of rights and democracy and new modes of political action spread from the struggle for racial justice to ever more arenas of American life, changing ideas and practices in local communities, national institutions, and intimate private relations. But even as this democratic revolution reached its peak, power began moving out of the public realm and into private ones, especially the corporate world. While the democratic revolution and the cultural changes associated with it irrevocably transformed daily practices and public attitudes, their structural impact was ultimately checked by a hollowing out of the political sphere, as society was increasingly shaped by corporations and financiers.

  An ascendant conservative political movement provided the ideological basis for the devaluation of government and a celebration of the market and business as the leading forces of social progress. Disagreements over the proper role of government in ensuring equality and in regulating individual behavior proved deeply divisive, fracturing the country into what were dubbed blue and red zones of liberalism and conservatism. Even as the country moved into a new century, battles of the 1960s and 1970s over race, gender, sexuality, and culture were refought again and again.

  The relationship between the United States and the rest of the world provides a third major organizing theme for this work. The country’s massive military, economic, and political engagement with other parts of the world after World War II makes it impossible to understand its history without considering foreign affairs. In no other period of similar length did external relations play as profound a role in the interior life of the United States as they did during the fifty-five years after World War II. The Cold War, the hot wars within it, the effort to create a world economic system advantageous to the United States, and the post–Cold War effort to maintain American global power influenced virtually every aspect of domestic life, from politics and economics to education and culture. The maintenance of a huge military establishment, in peaceful times as well as during war, and its permanent deployment abroad, marked a fundamental change in the American Republic. Military and foreign policy configurations associated with the Cold War outlasted their original reason for being, as they became deeply embedded in the structure of the society. Militarism, once associated with other lands, became a defining feature of the United States, shaping what kind of society it was, how it acted, and what its future held. The full story of global change during the second half of the twentieth century is outside the scope of this volume, but at least some of it has to be told to understand the history of the United States, given how deeply and inseparably its fortune became intertwined with the larger world.

  The surprising turns the United States took in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—the grandiose ambitions for world change, the embrace of preemptiv
e war, the open adoption of torture, the centralization of power in the presidency, the xenophobic-tinged patriotism—while in some ways departures from the recent past, in other ways represented a culmination of developments that had occurred during the years since World War II. This book concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the history of the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century represented a break with the past and the ways in which it represented an extension of the political and social vectors that this book chronicles.

  No book that covers more than a half century of the history of the United States can be comprehensive, and this one makes no such claim. Too much happened. Also, as a study building on the work of other scholars, writers, and journalists, this volume benefits in those areas about which much has been written, though trying as well to address aspects of American life that remain largely uncharted. In concentrating on major developments in politics, economics, foreign relations, social structure, popular culture, and everyday life, it gives far less attention to some facets of the country’s history than they deserve, from scientific thinking and the arts to sports and sexuality.

  The present always reflects the past, even if in its negation, and informs the future. During the years between World War II and the start of the twenty-first century, Americans profoundly transformed their country and much of the world, for better and for worse. The challenges the United States faces in the twenty-first century are in many ways different than those met before. Though very much a work of history, perhaps this book will be helpful in thinking through where the United States, as a society and a nation, should be going in the future.

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  E Pluribus Unum

  Shortly after World War II, writer and photographer George R. Stewart, documenting the 3,091-mile length of U.S. Highway 40 from New Jersey to California, noted the astonishing ecological diversity of the country and the striking regional variations in the social landscape and built environment. The roadway, Stewart wrote, “rises from sea-level to more than two miles above it, [while] . . . the annual precipitation varies from sixty to five inches. . . . Steamboat Springs, Colorado has a recorded temperature of fifty-four degrees below zero but on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada foothills you see palms and orange trees flourishing.” The busiest part of U.S. 40, in Delaware, carried an average of 22,688 cars a day, while at the Kansas-Colorado border on average more than three minutes passed with the road empty after each car went by.