The Sixties

From Memory to History

David Farber, David Farber

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781469608730
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

This collection of original essays represents some of the most exciting ways in which historians are beginning to paint the 1960s onto the larger canvas of American history. While the first literature about this turbulent period was written largely by participants, many of the contributors to this volume are young scholars who came of age intellectually in the 1970s and 1980s and thus write from fresh perspectives. The essayists ask fundamental questions about how much America really changed in the 1960s and why certain changes took place. In separate chapters, they explore how the great issues of the decade--the war in Vietnam, race relations, youth culture, the status of women, the public role of private enterprise--were shaped by evolutions in the nature of cultural authority and political legitimacy. They argue that the whirlwind of events and problems we call the Sixties can only be understood in the context of the larger history of post-World War II America. Contents
"Growth Liberalism in the Sixties: Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad, " by Robert M. Collins
"The American State and the Vietnam War: A Genealogy of Power, " by Mary Sheila McMahon
"And That's the Way It Was: The Vietnam War on the Network Nightly News, " by Chester J. Pach, Jr.
"Race, Ethnicity, and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy, " by David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta
"Nothing Distant about It: Women's Liberation and Sixties Radicalism, " by Alice Echols
"The New American Revolution: The Movement and Business, " by Terry H. Anderson
"Who'll Stop the Rain?: Youth Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, and Social Crises, " by George Lipsitz
"Sexual Revolution(s), " by Beth Bailey
"The Politics of Civility, " by Kenneth Cmiel
"The Silent Majority and Talk about Revolution, " by David Farber

1
Growth Liberalism in the Sixties

Great Societies at Home and Grand Designs Abroad

ROBERT M. COLLINS

Economic growth—as an idea, as a policy goal, and as a social reality—helps to define the sixties. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society were built on a faith in economic growth, both as an end in itself and as a tool for achieving other goals. Conservatives viewed economic growth as a validation of the free enterprise system. The seeming dependability of growth during much of the sixties shaped the dreams and nightmares of a good many political and cultural radicals. To examine the issue of economic growth in the sixties is to understand why so many believed so much was possible during those years and how events forced Americans to wrestle with the fact that the nation’s reach had exceeded its grasp. The specific ways American policymakers envisioned, pursued, and reacted to economic growth help to explain what made the sixties distinctive and also how the central themes of the era make sense in a larger historical frame.

To appreciate the place of economic growth in the sixties, one must begin, paradoxically, with a consideration of its opposite, stagnation. The Great Depression introduced a strong note of pessimism into the discussion of economic affairs in the 1930s, a fear that the United States now constituted a mature, indeed sclerotic, economy and faced a static rather than dynamic future.¹ It was against this backdrop of hopelessness that economic growth would take on its exceedingly powerful allure in the years after World War II.

During the depression, with economic pessimism nearly endemic, a full-blown school of economic analysis known as stagnationism emerged. Harvard economist Alvin Hansen gave the stagnationist theory its clearest formulation in his presidential address to the American Economic Association in December 1938. The economy, he told his colleagues, had previously depended for its dynamism on three crucial forces: population growth, the frontier, and technological innovation. In the modern, mature economy, however, these engines of growth simply did not work any longer. Population growth, on the decline throughout the 1920s because of a secular trend toward lower birth rates and diminished immigration due to legislative restriction, plummeted under the pressures of the depression. The territorial expansion of the frontier era was past. Technological innovation, such as the automobile, could not be counted upon to appear with sufficient regularity to propel the economy forward. Slack was now a natural condition of the economic system, and only large-scale government investment could prevent “sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment.”²

World War II proved that the stagnationists had underestimated the fundamental strength of the economy. Jump-started by the demands of war and sustained—to just what degree would become the subject of heated debate—by the subsequent mobilization for a cold war, the economy moved into a period of unparalleled affluence that would last until the early 1970s, an era that appears in retrospect to have been America’s economic golden age.

Where had the stagnationists gone wrong? The answer is that the engines of economic progress that Hansen had identified in 1938 had not expired but merely stalled. Population growth rebounded dramatically, as the vaunted baby boom in the years 1946-64 gave America the largest absolute population increase in its history.³ The frontier experience was replicated in the explosive growth of the crabgrass frontier of suburbia and in the emergence of the Sunbelt. Innovation continued to exert a healthy influence as the auto boom continued into the postwar years, with nearly 8 million passenger cars produced in 1955 (the prewar high had been 4.5 million in 1929).⁴ The chemical industry—as Benjamin Braddock learned in the sixties anthem movie The Graduate: “Just one word.... Are you listening?... Plastics”— joined electronics and other defense-related industries to move the economy forward. In other words, on each specific count of their analysis the pessimists were undone by events.

The postwar affluence took hold of the American imagination. Writers found new metaphors for the American experience in the visible institutions of abundance: the supermarket was especially favored. Life magazine rhapsodized about shoppers whose market carts “became cornucopias filled with an abundance that no other country in the world has ever known.”⁵ In his poem “Superman,” John Updike archly reported, “I drive my car to supermarket, / The way I take is superhigh, / A superlot is where I park it, / and Super Suds are what I buy.”⁶ And Norman Mailer heralded the political triumph of John F. Kennedy in 1960 in an essay entitled “Superman Comes to the Supermart.”⁷

The economic reality that underlay the imagery of abundance was striking. The gross national product (GNP), measured in constant 1954 dollars, rose from $181.8 billion in 1929 to $282.3 billion in 1947. By 1960 the GNP had increased by a further 56 percent, reaching $439.9 billion. Spending on personal consumption, measured in constant 1954 dollars, increased from $128.1 billion in 1929 to $195.6 billion in 1947, and to $298.1 billion in 1960.⁸

Admittedly, hidden beneath such rosy statistics was a more disquieting aspect of the postwar economic order. By any standard, either comparative or absolute, the income distribution in the United States remained skewed.⁹ In 1970 Paul Samuelson stated the matter picturesquely: “If we made an income pyramid out of a child’s blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.”¹⁰ Clearly, not all Americans shared fully in the postwar boom. Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and the elderly remained less well-off than others. Nevertheless, income distribution in the United States, however skewed, became slightly more equal during the postwar boom. The bottom 40 percent of American families received 12.5 percent of aggregate family personal income in 1929, 16.0 percent in 1947, and 16.1 percent in 1957; the top 20 percent of families received 54.4 percent of all income in 1929, 46.0 percent in 1947, and 45.3 percent in 1957.¹¹

In a similar way, although blacks did not share as fully as whites in the postwar bounty, their position did improve. In 1960 black males received 67 percent of the salary or wage income of whites; the figure for black females was only marginally better, 70 percent. Yet before the war the situation had been even worse, with black males and females receiving only 41 and 36 percent respectively of the income earned by their white counterparts.¹² Economic growth did not end discrimination or eliminate its ravages, but it did significantly lessen the existing economic disparities.

In mid-1955, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, observed that “American labor has never had it so good.”¹³ The same could be said for the majority of Americans. On one important point, however, the stagnationists had been prescient: The postwar affluence was accompanied by the emergence of a governmental presence in the economy that dwarfed even that of the New Deal. Federal spending, which during the Great Depression had crested at 10.5 percent of GNP in 1936, averaged 17.3 percent over the period 1947-60.¹⁴ The Employment Act of 1946 made formal the federal government’s responsibility to foster maximum employment, production, and purchasing power. The law also created a new institution, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), to provide the president with expert economic advice on a routine basis.

The Council of Economic Advisers moved from an emphasis on stability and full employment as the chief ends of federal economic policy at the end of the war to a new emphasis by 1949 on economic growth as the overriding goal. Much of the impetus for the shift came from the formidable influence of CEA member and later chairman Leon H. Keyserling. The emphasis both contributed to the postwar boom and reflected its influence. The council’s 1949 report stressed that “the doctrine of secular stagnation no longer finds place in any important public circle with which we are familiar.” In its place, the council presented “the firm conviction that our business system and with it our whole economy can and should continue to grow.”¹⁵

The council’s emphasis on growth as the overriding goal of economic policy did not last, however. The return of the Republicans to presidential power in 1953 brought a renewed emphasis on the other elements in the constellation of concerns guiding policymakers, notably stability and inflation; growth was not completely dismissed but it was subordinated to these other concerns.¹⁶ Regarding inflation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower considered the battle “never-ending.”¹⁷ When asked at a press conference whether the administration had worried “a little too much about inflation ... and perhaps not enough about the slow rate of growth of our economy,” Ike responded that “economic growth in the long run cannot be soundly brought about except with stability in your price structure.”¹⁸

The administration’s stance helped make economic growth a matter of controversy in Eisenhower’s second term. The growth of the early postwar years slowed distinctly. Real GNP increased at a yearly rate of 3.8 percent from 1947 to 1954, but at a lower 3.2 percent rate from 1954 to 1960. Potential GNP (a calculation based on the assumption of full employment) grew at an average of 4.4 percent per year in the earlier period (1947-54) and at only 3.5 percent per year for the years 1954-60.¹⁹ Of course, from a more recent perspective the economic performance of the Eisenhower years appears highly satisfactory in most respects. But the loss of economic momentum was sufficient for the question of economic growth to become a major public controversy and a staple of partisan politics before the 1950s were over.

In the mid-1950s, cold war competition raised the stakes of partisan political sniping to a new, higher level. In May 1957 Nikita Khrushchev predicted that the Soviet Union would “soon catch up to the U.S. level of per capita output of meat, milk, and butter; then, we shall have shot a highly powerful torpedo at the underpinnings of capitalism.”²⁰ With the threat of mutual nuclear destruction still overhanging the world, the cold war took on the additional dimension of economic competition. The development of a Soviet nuclear capability and the launching of Sputnik were hard proofs, in the eyes of Walter Lippmann, that “the prevailing picture of the Soviet economy as primitive and grossly inefficient was false.”²¹

The economic contest between the superpowers focused especially on the matter of growth. Again, Khrushchev made the point with frightening directness: “Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system, enhance the influence of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, strengthen the Socialist camp and contribute to the victory of the cause of peace throughout the world.”²² To American listeners, the threat was clear.

Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), underlined the threat when he testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in late 1959. Soviet industrial production, he reported, “has been growing at a rate at least twice as rapidly as that of the United States since 1950.” The Soviet GNP “has also been growing twice as rapidly as that of the United States over the past 8 years.” Dulles’s generally scholarly and judicious analysis avoided cold war hysterics, but he noted ominously, “If the Soviet industrial growth rate persists at 8 or 9 percent per annum over the next decade, as is forecast, the gap between our two economies by 1970 will be dangerously narrowed unless our own industrial growth rate is substantially increased from the present pace.”²³

Observers reacted to the emergence of an economic cold war in a variety of ways. To some, the matter was nothing but a numbers game.²⁴ Others, including the outstanding growth theorist Evsey D. Domar, an MIT economist, believed the Soviet growth rate worrisome; he warned that “the influence played by a country in world affairs is related to its economic size.” Jay Lovestone of the AFL-CIO believed that America’s own domestic well-being required more rapid growth, and that the Soviet threat made the need all the more urgent. Howard C. Peterson of the Committee for Economic Development, a corporate-liberal business group, was less troubled: “Surely we wish to progress as rapidly as in the past, and to do better if we can—but not at any cost....