American Empire Read online

  When World War II ended, the United States was much more a conglomeration of regions with distinctive forms of economic activity, politics, and culture than it would be when the twentieth century drew to a close. Differences in physical environment and histories of settlement accounted for some of the variations in way of life that Stewart observed during his trip across the country. The New Englanders and middle southerners who settled Oregon set a far more conservative tone than the gold rushers and Scandinavians who went to neighboring Washington, which in the mid-1940s was perhaps the most liberal state in the Union. As states developed differently, disparate sets of laws, institutions, and structures of power molded and protected particular economic, social, and cultural arrangements.

  The great size of the United States, its relative political stability, and its extraordinary social dynamism all contributed to its economic and military might, dramatically demonstrated in World War II. Yet even as economic and technological changes drew together various parts of the country, the Constitution, in preserving the importance of the states, had the effect of retarding homogenization. Differences in state economies, social arrangements, and political cultures in turn shaped the national polity.

  Mid-twentieth-century portraits of the United States recognized the importance of state and regional variation. Scholarly studies of physical, economic, and human geography typically took the form of surveys that described particularities of each part of the country and compared them to one another. The massive documentation of U.S. history, culture, and built environment undertaken by the Federal Writers’ Project during the 1930s conformed to this model, too. Designed to put unemployed writers to work, the project, reflecting a progressive New Deal nationalism that sought authenticity in regional culture, produced a series of superb guidebooks organized by state, city, and highway. National Geographic Magazine, with a 1946 circulation of one and a quarter million, had a more centrist perspective, but it shared the New Deal’s celebration of local and regional life, regularly featuring state profiles with titles like “Nevada, Desert Treasure House” and “Arkansas Rolls Up Its Sleeves.” For a more literary audience, Erskine Caldwell edited a series of books on regional history and folkways by such accomplished authors as Carey McWilliams, Wallace Stegner, and Meridel Le Sueur. Political studies also often took the form of regional excursions, such as journalist John Gunther’s 1947 best seller, Inside U.S.A.

  Recapturing life in the United States at the end of World War II requires looking first separately at the different regions of the country. While Americans shared many national experiences, from presidential elections to Hollywood movies to world wars, their daily experiences were rooted in and bound by particular places, places that as Stewart discovered varied immensely from one another. Regional commonalities shaped political attitudes and cultural inclinations. Conflicts and relationships among the regions helped set the political and social trajectory of the country. Out of many, one.

  The Midwest

  The Midwest loomed large in midcentury portraits of the United States. More than any other part of the country, it displayed features of the nation as a whole. In 1940, the U.S. center of population lay in the heart of the Midwest, due south of Chicago, where the 39th parallel intersects the Indiana-Illinois border. (Ten years later it had moved a few dozen miles west and south.) Because the Midwest combined physical and social characteristics of the surrounding regions, it often served as a national bellwether. From the start of the Civil War through the end of World War II, nine of the fifteen presidents came from the region.

  The importance of the Midwest lay not only in its centrality but also in the size of its population and its economic prowess. In 1950, the East North Central states—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—had the largest population of any of the nation’s geographic subdivisions and per capita income well above the national average.

  The economic strength of the Midwest came from a combination of high-yield agriculture, large-scale manufacturing, and efficient transportation. In the nation as a whole, by 1920 a majority of the population lived in urban areas, but well after World War II much of the Midwest remained overwhelmingly rural. Until 1950 most Minnesotans lived on farms or ranches or in towns with fewer than twenty-five hundred residents. In South Dakota, it took until 1960 for the urban population to outnumber those living in the countryside.

  Midwestern farms formed a vast checkerboard of grain, corn, and soybean fields that seemed to go on forever. Rich soil, relatively flat land, and heavy investment in mechanization made them extraordinarily productive. In North Star Country (1945), Meridel Le Sueur wrote that “on a warm night when the bright moon is up after a shower has fairly wet the earth and waked up the drowsy corn, I will swear that you can see the stalk stretch and swell in its new sheath. . . . You hear the green cry of growth and the potatoes murmur to each other ‘move over.’” One economic geographer characterized western Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, eastern Nebraska, and southern Minnesota as supporting “probably the most independent and prosperous farm population of similar extent in all the world.”

  Farm life before World War II meant long hours of very hard work and few creature comforts, even in the relatively well-off Midwest. Farm productivity did not grow greatly during the first decades of the twentieth century, with human and animal power still providing much of the energy for planting, weeding, harvesting, and domestic chores. When in the early 1970s Studs Terkel—a veteran of the Federal Writers’ Project, who popularized oral history—interviewed Katherine Haynes for his book Working, she recalled a lifetime of “housework and farmin’,” working “eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. . . . Just hard work.” As late as 1935, only one of ten farms nationally had electricity. During the Depression, plummeting prices and decreasing output brought a massive drop in farm income.

  The New Deal and World War II brought relief. Federal programs limiting production and subsidizing prices, followed by rising wartime demand, pushed up commodity prices and farm income. Farmers reduced their debt and invested in greater mechanization and fertilizer use, raising farm productivity nationally by more than 25 percent during World War II. By 1950, in the northern half of the country tractors largely had replaced horses, and harvesting combines were drastically reducing the need for seasonal labor.

  Meanwhile, the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), one of the New Deal’s most successful programs, rapidly electrified the nation’s farms. By 1950, 90 percent had been wired. Political reporter Samuel Lubell, traveling the country in the early 1950s to decipher electoral patterns, reported that in Gutherie County, Iowa, “the 3,200 members of the Gutherie REA Co-operative had among them 3,800 radio sets, 1,200 electric cooking ranges, 600 electric water heaters, 2,700 electric refrigerators and 500 television sets” (making them early adopters of what was still a very new technology). The extension of the power grid, in addition to revolutionizing rural domestic life, especially for women, who had done the backbreaking work of drawing water, cooking, and cleaning without electricity, allowed further improvements in farm productivity. Before World War II, an estimated 90 percent of cows were milked by hand. By the mid-1960s, essentially all commercial dairy operations milked mechanically.

  Not all of the rural heartland thrived. The western Plains proved too dry for consistently profitable agriculture. Farmsteads tended to be poorly built and maintained, and separated by great distances, creating social isolation, as captured in the bleak opening minutes of MGM’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. In the book on which it was based, L. Frank Baum described a Kansas vista in which “not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions.” Through World War II, shacks originally thrown up to establish residence for nineteenth-century homestead claims continued to be used. In the summer, wrote Eric Thane in a wartime volume on the Dakotas, it could be “so hot that when you sit on the metal seat of the tractor y
our sweat-soaked overalls hiss.” Not surprisingly, a steady stream of young people left the region.

  As important as midwestern agriculture was, manufacturing dwarfed it in the number of workers it employed and the value of its output. American industry had long been concentrated in a band stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, bordered on the north by the Great Lakes and on the South by the Ohio and Potomac rivers. During the 1940s, this belt produced three-quarters of the value created by all U.S. manufacturing. Within it, the greatest concentration of industrial power lay in the Great Lakes states.

  Midwestern manufacturing exceeded all its rivals, domestic and foreign, in the scale of its productive facilities and its degree of regimentation. No plant more embodied these traits than the Ford Motor Company’s vast River Rouge complex, just outside Detroit. Covering over a thousand acres, it was the largest factory complex in the world. In 1947, sixty-two thousand workers passed through its gates, down from a wartime peak of over ninety thousand. River Rouge produced almost everything that went into an automobile. The complex took in raw materials—iron ore, coal, limestone, crude rubber—and spewed out thousands of finished automobiles a day, utilizing its own coke ovens, blast furnaces, steel mill, tire factory, glass factory, foundry, stamping plant, and machine shop. By standardizing products, building highly specialized machinery for parts production, breaking the manufacturing process into small, discrete tasks, and deploying assembly lines to mechanically transfer components and pace the labor process, the approach to manufacturing that Ford developed in the early twentieth century vastly increased worker productivity while decreasing the need for skilled labor.

  Artists, journalists, intellectuals, and politicians, in Europe as well as the United States, seized on “Fordism”—the initial term for the mass production of complex consumer goods—as a symbol of modernity and American prowess, while more broadly equating giant industrial facilities with man’s Promethean conquest of the material world. Yet Ford-style modernity contained many seemingly archaic elements. Far from an orderly corporate bureaucracy, the Ford Motor Company until the late 1940s remained a privately held, secretive empire, with no clear lines of authority and bitter rivalries among its leaders. Prior to Ford’s signing its first union contract, in 1941, several thousand members of the “Service Department”—in many cases convicts paroled to the company—maintained worker discipline within the Rouge complex and undercut efforts at collective action through spy networks and thuggery. After unionization, the department was renamed “Plant Protection,” but the penchant for rule by fist was only partially checked. Henry Ford’s personal politics—a notorious anti-Semite, before the war he had displayed fascist sympathies—seemed of a piece with the authoritarianism he used to run his industrial domain.

  Mass-production facilities could be found in all parts of the country, but as a technical and social system Fordism had originated in the Midwest and remained centered there well after World War II. No other plant matched the Rouge in size or degree of vertical integration, but giant Fordist factories dotted the region. During World War II, Ford itself built a mile-long factory in Willow Run, on the outskirts of Detroit, to make B-24 bombers using assembly-line techniques. After the war, several companies manufactured cars there. In downtown Detroit, the Packard Motor Car Company built luxury automobiles at a ninety-five-building complex that stretched for a mile along Grand Boulevard. The Chrysler Corporation had a dozen factories in the Detroit area, including the Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck, which in 1953 employed thirty-two thousand workers. General Motors, the world’s largest automaker, had its corporate headquarters and a dozen factories in Detroit and its environs, but its vast production network was centered seventy miles north, in Flint, where it had a host of parts, body, and assembly plants employing sixty thousand workers. Cleveland, Toledo, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Akron, and other midwestern cities housed yet more car, truck, tractor, and vehicle parts plants. Furthermore, many manufacturers outside of the vehicle industry employed Fordist methods adapted from the carmakers.

  Fordism constituted more than simply a set of production techniques; it was a complex set of social relationships, business strategies, and existential values. Mass production required and helped create a mass market. Fordist enterprises used standardized product design and production efficiency to keep prices down, while paying by national and international standards high wages. Only by doing so could they retain their workers, given the grueling physical demands and demeaning autocracy of their production regimes, which the arrival of industrial unionism during the 1930s and 1940s had just begun to temper (“reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, shove in cotterpin, reachunder, adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, reachunderadjustscrewdownreachunderadjust, until every ounce of life was sucked off into production,” was the way John Dos Passos described Fordism in his 1936 novel The Big Money). Together high productivity, high wages, and low prices created the basis for the mass consumerism that would be a hallmark of the post–World War II decades.

  Though the population makeup varied from city to city, overall European immigrants and their children made up a large part of the midwestern industrial labor force. But Detroit had a significant Middle Eastern population, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese; Chicago and other steelmaking centers were home to many Mexican Americans; and Canadians could be found throughout the upper Midwest. The draw of industrial jobs, especially during the world wars, brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans to the area from the South. The black population of Detroit doubled from 1940 to 1950, reaching 300,506 the latter year, 16 percent of the total population. In Chicago it went from 277,731 to 492,265. Racial and religious tension, exacerbated by insufficient housing and job discrimination, made many midwestern cities tinderboxes, with racial clashes not uncommon.

  Midwestern agriculture and manufacturing complemented one another. Farmers provided a significant market for regionally produced manufactured goods. Also, as agriculture grew less labor-intensive, it provided a source of workers for manufacturing. GM populated its Flint plants with recruits from the rural Midwest. It also drew workers from the upper South. During and after the war, a massive flow of migrants left depressed farming and mining regions of that area for midwestern towns and cities and the factories they housed. At the Bal-Band auto parts plant in South Bend, Indiana, during the 1950s half of the six thousand workers had moved up from the South. Many midwesterners did some farming while working part- or full-time in industry, a pattern facilitated by the trend among manufacturers to site new plants in rural or outer suburban locales. Other midwestern factory workers viewed their jobs as temporary, hoping to accumulate capital to go into or back to farming in the areas from where they came.

  Midwestern cities, in addition to being manufacturing centers, served as financial, marketing, and transportation hubs for their hinterlands. The Chicago Board of Trade, though hurt by the Depression and government controls during World War II, rebounded after the war to become one of the world’s leading agricultural commodity markets. Kansas City, which in 1946 had 350 passenger trains a day passing through (compared to six in 2010), dominated trade for large parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The city housed steel, auto, airplane, and garment factories, yet it also served as one of the country’s major markets for cattle, horses, mules, grain, butter, eggs, and poultry. Towering concrete grain elevators—a distinctive feature of the mid-twentieth-century American landscape—lined the Missouri River, while huge stockyards imparted a pungent odor to the city, a daily reminder of the close links between the urban Midwest and the great surrounding agricultural cornucopia.

  The Northeast

  In the Northeast, manufacturing loomed even larger than in the Midwest but was organized differently. Manufacturing districts dating back to the nineteenth or even eighteenth century, teeming with small factories, workshops, supply houses, diners, and bars, defined the industrial landscape of many northeastern cities, not
giant twentieth-century factories, as in Detroit, Flint, and Toledo. At the end of World War II, New York City was by far the nation’s largest manufacturing center, with nearly a million manufacturing workers, yet on average its manufacturing establishments had only twenty-five employees. In the garment and printing industries, the city’s largest, firms tended to be small, family owned, and manufactured custom items or relatively short runs of ever-varying products. Versatility and fast delivery times mattered more than minimizing unit costs through mechanization and intensive industrial engineering.

  A similar pattern could be found in Rhode Island, the most industrialized state in the nation. Half its manufacturing employees worked in the textile industry, which had large plants, heavy capital investment, and long production runs. But the rest worked in industries like costume jewelry and machine tool manufacturing that fashioned a vast array of products, with new designs introduced frequently.

  Even many outsize industrial facilities in the Northeast produced goods in small batches or to custom order. The sprawling Philadelphia factories of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, E. G. Budd, and J. G. Brill turned out locomotives, trolleys, and railroad cars whose size, complexity, and low production volume made assembly-line techniques largely irrelevant. The electrical equipment industry was heavily concentrated in the Northeast, in Pittsburgh, Erie, Schenectady, Bridgeport, Lynn, Pittsfield, Camden, and other urban locales. Highly skilled male workers virtually handcrafted heavy equipment, like turbines, large motors, and locomotives, though some plants employed assembly-line workers—many female—to produce consumer goods like radios and refrigerators.