Modern American Lives: Individuals and Issues in American History Since 1945

Individuals and Issues in American History Since 1945

Blaine T Browne, Robert C. Cottrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317464655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The individuals presented in these narrative biographies significantly, and sometimes decisively, impacted contemporary American life in a wide range of areas, including national politics, foreign policy, social and political activism, popular and literary culture, sports, and business. The combined biographical/thematic approach is designed to serve two purposes: to present more substantive biographical information, and to offer a fuller examination of key events and issues. The book is an ideal supplement for undergraduate courses on The United States Since 1945, as well as for courses on Modern America and 20th Century America.

Part I

The Years of Consensus,
1945–1960

The American people emerged from World War II with their confidence in the nation’s institutions and ideals greatly strengthened. This newborn consensus, along with unprecedented material abundance, greatly enhanced the nation’s internal cohesion during a time of perceived peril. As the world’s first nuclear superpower, the United States embraced new international obligations as the ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union unfolded in the postwar years.

This Cold War produced new challenges, and Americans sometimes disagreed as to how the nation’s enemies, at home and abroad, could be overcome. The great majority of Americans, accepting the prevailing thesis that the Cold War was the consequence of Soviet aggression, endorsed the “containment” of communism. Some high-level civilian and military officials argued that an aggressive nuclear strategy, including the willingness to wage nuclear war, was a necessity in the face of such an implacable foe. A dissident few, however, contending that apparent Soviet belligerence was a product of fear rather than an indication of unlimited ambition, advocated a less confrontational approach in foreign policy as a means of reducing tensions. The Cold War also had a significant domestic impact, perhaps most conspicuously in the contentious debate over how national security needs might be balanced against constitutionally protected civil liberties. The era of the Second Red Scare often pitted advocates of expanded government investigative and prosecutorial powers against those who argued that dissent was not necessarily subversion.

Despite the anxieties generated by the Cold War during this period, the new prosperity and relative social stability were conducive to new directions in popular culture and entertainment, leading, among other things, to a revolution in popular music. Abundance and domestic tranquility likewise allowed for a tentative questioning of core social values. While many Americans unquestioningly embraced the pleasures and material comforts of the postwar era, other individuals were estranged from mainstream society. Some minorities, excluded because of their race, struggled valiantly for acceptance; others rejected the basic premises of the abundant society and offered alternative definitions of a meaningful existence. Thus, even during an era of broad national consensus, American society still produced the rebellious few. A broader impulse for significant social and cultural change would not emerge until the 1960s, but the mass social movements of that era have obvious predecessors in the previous decade.

1

Defining the Cold War

The Cold War dominated both the international arena and American politics for nearly a half-century following the end of World War II. Pitting wartime partners, the United States and the Soviet Union, against each other, this conflict involved allies, surrogates, and seemingly neutral countries in military, paramilitary, economic, cultural, and ideological battles. Although not leading directly to a martial clash involving American and Russian soldiers, the costs of the Cold War were enormous, nevertheless, in terms of lives lost, resources expended, and opportunities missed. Soviet-American hostilities resulted in a massive arms race and dramatically affected emerging nations across the globe. In the United States, a domestic version of the Cold War led to a militarization of American foreign policy, the expansion of a national security state, the restriction of civil liberties, and a failure to address social and economic problems. During its early phases, a few perceptive individuals foresaw how expensive, financially and otherwise, the Cold War would become.

George F. Kennan and Henry A. Wallace, two of the most astute observers of the Cold War, eventually challenged the activities of their own nation, seeking to shape U.S. policies, albeit in decidedly different fashions. Indeed, operating in the midst of humankind’s greatest conflagration, Kennan and Wallace articulated contrasting visions of the future, representing, however imperfectly, the so-called realist and idealist schools of foreign policy strategists. At the height of U.S. involvement in World War II, Kennan served as a little-known adviser in the State Department, while Wallace held the second-highest elective office in the land. The impact of both men proved enduring. Kennan became associated with the doctrine of containment, which called for the United States to meet the threat posed by the Soviet Union on the European continent. Eventually, that doctrine came to define American postwar foreign policy on a global basis, a development that troubled its architect, ironically enough. Nor was Kennan pleased with this country’s increasing reliance on military solutions, rather than political or economic ones. At the same time, he advocated the use of covert operations against pro-Soviet regimes throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself, a policy he later attempted to downplay.

Wallace, for his part, offered a different perspective, envisioning a “People’s Century” unfolding in both the United States and elsewhere once the guns of war were silenced. Unlike Kennan, Wallace hoped to retain the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, seeking to draw the leaders of the Politburo into the world community, rather than isolate them as pariahs with little vested interest in amicable relationships. Had it not been for the insistence of Democratic Party bosses at the 1944 Democratic National Comvention that Wallace be replaced as vice president, he would have become president upon Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. Instead, the succession fell to Harry S Truman. The new American president viewed the Soviet Union in a more jaundiced manner and eventually adopted a more hardline approach than Wallace favored. During Truman’s administration, the Cold War tore apart the wartime Grand Alliance that allowed the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to thwart the Axis powers. It also tilted the United States away from the liberalism that had characterized the country during the New Deal era and even throughout much of the war. This shift troubled Wallace considerably more than Kennan, who was generally less concerned about domestic developments than the former vice president.

GEORGE F. KENNAN
Architect of Containment

At 9:00 PM on February 22, 1946, George Kennan, a forty-four-year-old seasoned diplomat residing in Moscow, fired off a warning to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes. His message, which came to be referred to as the Long Telegram, articulated the need for the United States to contain the Soviet Union. At this defining moment in the Cold War, Kennan, drawing on his familiarity with Russian history, underscored how “urgent” it was to predict postwar Soviet policy and devise an appropriate, realistic American response. According to Kennan, Soviet leaders feared “antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement,’” believed that “no permanent peaceful coexistence” was possible, possessed a “neurotic view” of world events, and “sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics.” The “neurotic” Politburo, exhibiting a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and aided by “an elaborate and far flung apparatus” unprecedented in scope, boasted “a police regime par excellence” and stood “committed fanatically” to the disruption of American society and the destruction of “our traditional way of life.” The Soviet threat posed the gravest problem American diplomats had ever encountered, Kennan acknowledged, but one that could be confronted without resort to war, in part because the Soviet Union, unlike Nazi Germany, was “neither schematic nor adventuristic” and was “highly sensitive to [the] logic of force.”

Thus, Kennan remained convinced that the “capitalist’ world” could indeed live “at peace with itself and Russia” if the “forces of intolerance and subversion” were held in check. Although this new brand of Russian nationalism, drawing on international Marxism, was “more dangerous and insidious than ever before,” the U.S. government needed to educate the American people about the great communist state, thereby dampening “hysterical anti-Sovietism” in the process. Ultimately, Kennan argued, “much depends on [the] health and vigor of our own society,” for “world communism is like [a] malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” In fact, the greatest peril confronting the American people “is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

Kennan’s Long Telegram provided a blueprint for postwar U.S. foreign policy by warning that Soviet expansionism could not go unchecked. Yet it also insisted that the Politburo hardly had a plan for worldwide dominance; thus, peace was possible and hysteria must be avoided. In the period ahead, too few U.S. policy makers heeded Kennan’s words regarding the limited nature of Soviet goals and the need to ensure that the United States remain an authentic beacon of liberty and freedom. They also failed to appreciate how conflicted Kennan was in interpreting the moves and designs of the USSR, how he lacked the certainty that both Sovietphiles and Sovietphobes possessed in abundance.

The intensely driven, insecure but ambitious man who became known as the father of containment was a product of the early twentieth-century American Midwest, a not altogether happy elite education, and lengthy training as a diplomat with a particular expertise in Russian history, culture, and ideology. Born in frigid Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 16, 1904, George Frost Kennan boasted Scotch-Irish and English ancestors, some of whose ties to the North American continent could be traced back to early colonial times. Overcoming a hardscrabble background, his father, Kossuth Kennan, became both a lawyer and an engineer before settling in Milwaukee, where he established a reputation as a leading tax attorney. Kossuth, whose second wife died shortly after giving birth to George, had three other children with his third wife. The family lived in a comfortable, three-story, Victorian-style house. Kennan’s father demonstrated a fondness for languages and an elegant writing style, as would his son; Kossuth also possessed an emotional reserve and a demanding nature that made for a difficult relationship with his oldest child. George Kennan undertook his initial trip abroad at the age of eight, joining his father in traveling to Germany, where he met a cousin of his grandfather. That gentleman, also named George Kennan, was the renowned author of Siberia and the Exile System, which condemned penal life under the czar. Considering his “moody, self-centered, neurotic” son in need of discipline, Kossuth sent George off to St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and then to Princeton University. The Ivy League’s snobbery hardly suited the ill-prepared Kennan, who later self-effacingly suggested, “I may have been the most undistinguished student Princeton ever had.”

Not wishing to return to Milwaukee, Kennan—tall, thin, and sporting already rapidly thinning hair—took the examination for the U.S. Foreign Service. His early diplomatic career took him overseas where, while studying Russian at the University of Berlin, he met a Norwegian woman, Annelise Soerensen, whom he married in September 1931. After a brief stint in Washington, DC, with the State Department’s Division of Eastern European Affairs, Kennan returned overseas in late 1933, assisting Ambassador William Bullitt in Moscow. From October 1937 through August 1938, Kennan joined the Soviet desk for the State Department in Washington, DC. Next, stationed as second secretary and consul in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Kennan exhibited certain disturbing attitudes, noting at one point that “benevolent despotism,” not democracy, possessed “greater possibilities for good,” an astonishing pronouncement in an era when dictators imperiled democracy’s very existence. Equally troubling, he demonstrated a disconcerting reluctance to assist those pleading for assistance in escaping from Nazi-controlled territory. The entrance of the United States into World War II while Kennan was serving in the American consulate led to a five-month internment at Bad Nauheim, Germany. Following his release in June 1942, Kennan returned to the State Department, before heading overseas to take up posts in Lisbon, London, and Moscow. In February 1946, now stationed as chargé d’affaires in Moscow, he received a request from the U.S. Treasury Department to produce a report on the Soviet Union.

Prior to drafting the Long Telegram, Kennan had achieved a growing recognition as a Soviet expert highly critical of the Stalinist regime. Kennan’s analysis of the Soviet Union drew from his sense of history, rather than from ideological considerations alone. While serving in Tallinn, Estonia, and Riga, Latvia, in the early 1930s, Kennan and other young diplomats had operated under the tutelage of Robert Kelley, who served in the East European Affairs division of the State Department and opposed U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. Although the Roosevelt administration discarded the policy of nonrecognition, Kennan remained skeptical about the Soviet Union, having tracked the Soviet purge trials that resulted in the murder of Old Bolsheviks and many others, communists and noncommunists alike. While viewing the Germans as “the final despair of Western European civilization,” Kennan, unlike many liberals and radicals in the West, never deemed the Soviet Union “a fit ally or associate, actual or potential” for the United States. Although recognizing that financial assistance for the Soviets might be necessary to further “our own self-interest,” Kennan warned against identifying the United States with Soviet depredations by welcoming the USSR “as an associate in the defense of democracy.”

President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill determined that the Red Army must be aided in its battle against German invaders. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and subsequent declarations of war against each other by Germany and the United States, the Grand Alliance emerged as a kind of antifascist front. Kennan, however, remained scathingly critical of America’s new Soviet ally. Meanwhile, both liberals and conservatives, ranging from Vice President Henry Wallace to Henry Luce, editor and publisher of Time, Fortune, and Life, portrayed the Soviet Union and its leader, Joseph Stalin, in a glorified, simplistic light, which led to unrealistic expectations and, ultimately, dashed hopes. It also resulted in many Americans undertaking the kind of dramatic ideological shift that was foreign to Kennan.

Shortly after his return to Moscow in 1944, Kennan produced a lengthy essay, “Russia—Seven Years Later,” which he considered more finely honed than a more celebrated paper he would draft three years later; this document displayed his characteristically ambivalent analysis of the communist state. Though the purges were “enormously destructive in human values,” he commended the Russian people, who had endured the loss of between 25 and 30 million citizens, for “their own extraordinary capacity for heroism and endurance”—yet warned that it would be foolish to downplay the “potential—for good or for evil” of the 200 million people under Soviet dominion. As the war in Europe ended, Kennan produced another paper exploring the Soviet Union’s stance, seeking to contest “the Rooseveltian dream”—shared by Henry Wallace—of cordial relations with that powerful state, which held “conquered provinces in submission.” Again, Kennan insisted it was not ideology but rather an “age-old sense of insecurity” that drove the Politburo to act as it did. While the communist movement seemed “unrivaled … in energy, initiative, unity, discipline, and ruthlessness,” Russian control involved “the inevitable drawbacks of foreign rule.” In addition, the communist leaders had “lost moral dominion over the Russian people” because “the fire of revolutionary Marxism has definitely died out.” Kennan concluded his observations by indicating that no Russian leader believed that the West could quash Soviet demands, a sensibility that he became convinced, shortly after the war, had to be refuted.

By January 1946, Stalin apparently questioned whether communist and capitalist states could coexist. Kennan, serving as chargé d’affaires in Moscow, responded to a request from the United States Treasury for an evaluation of recent Soviet actions, including demands for certain portions of northern Iran. Believing that the timing was ripe, Kennan issued the Long Telegram: “They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it.” Although some chroniclers later disputed the impact of Kennan’s missive, Clark Clifford, then serving as a presidential assistant, termed it “probably the most important and influential message ever sent to Washington by an American diplomat.” Prop...