Postwar United States

Students will need to understand how the postwar economic boom, mightily affected by the transforming hand of science, produced epic changes in American education, consumer culture, suburbanization, the return to domesticity for many women, the character of corporate life, and sexual and cultural mores--both of which involved startling changes in dress, speech, music, film and television, family structure, uses of leisure time, and more.

All of this can take on deeper meaning when connected to politics. Politically, the era was marked by the reinvigoration of New Deal liberalism and its gradual exhaustion in the 1970s. In the period of liberal activism, leaders sought to expand the role of the state to extend civil liberties and promote economic opportunity. The advent of the civil rights and women’s movements thus became part of the third great reform impulse in American history. Conservative reaction stressed restrictions on the growth of the state, emphasized free enterprise, and promoted individual rather than group rights.

The Cold War set the framework for global politics for 45 years after the end of World War II. The Cold War so strongly influenced our domestic politics, the conduct of foreign affairs, and the role of the government in the economy after 1945 that it is obligatory for students to examine its origins and the forces behind its continuation into the late 20th century. They should understand how American and European antipathy to Leninist-Stalinism predated 1945, seeded by the gradual awareness of the messianic nature of Soviet communism during the interwar years, Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture, and the great purges of the 1930s. Students should also consider the Soviet Union’s goals following World War II. Its catastrophic losses in the war and fear of rapid German recovery were factors in Soviet demands for a sphere of influence on its western borders, achieved through the establishment of governments under Soviet military and political control. Students should also know how the American policy of containment was successfully conducted in Europe: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, NATO, and the maintenance of U.S. military forces in Europe under what was called the nuclear “balance of terror.”

They should also recognize that the U.S. government’s anti-Communist strategy of containment in Asia confronted very different circumstances and would involve the United States in the bloody, costly wars of Korea and Vietnam. The Vietnam War is especially noteworthy. It demonstrated the power of American public opinion in reversing foreign policy, it tested the democratic system to its limits, it left scars on American society that have not yet been erased, and it made many Americans deeply skeptical about future military or even peacekeeping interventions.