Democratic Empire

The United States Since 1945

Jim Cullen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119027348, 9781119027355
• eBook ISBN: 9781119027362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts

DEMOCRATIC EMPIRE DEMOCRATIC EMPIRE

The United States Since 1945

Democracy and empire often seem like competing, even opposing, concepts. And yet, since the end of World War II, the United States has integrated elements of both in the process of becoming a dominant global power. Democratic Empire: The United States Since 1945 explores the way democracy and empire have converged and been challenged both at home and abroad, surveying the nation's recent cultural, political and economic history. This account pays particular attention to mass media, the fine arts, and intellectual currents in the era of the American Dream. Concise and engagingly written, Democratic Empire presents a unique analysis of US history since 1945 and the egalitarian and imperial forces that have shaped contemporary America.

Part I
The Postwar Decades

1
Victory and Anxiety: World War and Cold War, 1945–1962

Figure 1.1 CHE BELLO! Residents of New York City’s Little Italy neighborhood greeting the news of Japanese surrender in August 1945. The victory of the United States and its allies in World War II left the nation in a position of unparalleled global supremacy that defined its expectations for decades to come.

(Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, 20540, USA, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c35620)

Colony to Colonizer: American Rise to Globalism

Awesome

In recent decades, the word has been a slang expression of approval. “That was an awesome game.” “Those are awesome shoes.” “She’s really an awesome person.”¹ Rarely do those who use the term consider its literal meaning: that which inspires amazement, even fear, in its overwhelming power. “Awe” generally (including awful as well as awesome) has often had religious connotations; Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, or the earth-shaking grief of God as Jesus died on the cross: these were events that evoked awe for those who experienced them. Earthly phenomena can be awesome too. A volcanic eruption or a tornado is an awesome experience. So is the miracle of birth.

Here’s something else that’s awesome: US military power. With bases that circle the globe, soldiers who are the best equipped and trained in the world, and cutting-edge technology that is continually updated, the president of the United States can, at a moment’s notice, wreak terrifying havoc on just about any location on this planet, and by having his orders executed at the touch of a button that directs a drone. And that doesn’t even take into account bombs that are capable of destroying all life on earth, or any number of weapons systems of which most of us are blissfully ignorant. There are of course any number of practical inhibitions on the ability to exercise this power, and any number of ways determined enemies are currently plotting their ways around it (the technical term for this is “asymmetrical warfare”), something that has been accomplished with notable success in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and New York’s World Trade Center, among other places in the last 75 years. But neither friend nor foe can doubt the immensity of the destructive power that the United States currently has at its disposal.

This awesome capacity, which has been used for good as well as evil, has been a fact of global life since World War II. Actually, in relative terms, English North Americans were powerful from their beginnings. Despite the tenuousness of colonial settlements on the eastern seaboard in the early decades of the seventeenth century, New Englanders were able to defeat Native peoples in the Pequot War of the 1630s, less than a decade after Massachusetts was founded. Colonial Virginians prevailed over the Powhatan Indians in 1622 and 1644, and English settlers generally prevailed in wars against Indians that stretched over the next century and half. There was no question that the British Empire was vastly more powerful than the colonists who went to war for their independence in 1776, and yet the Americans were able to win it anyway (with help from their French, Spanish, and Dutch allies). For most of the nineteenth century, US security was guaranteed by the British Navy, which effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 that warned European powers against reasserting themselves in the western hemisphere (that’s because Britain had a shared interest in keeping rivals out). Such insulation allowed the nation to assert its dominion over the rest of the North American continent in wars with Mexico and various indigenous peoples. Even when the United States was wracked by a fierce Civil War, England and France, though tempted, thought better of intervening to bolster their respective positions in North America. When the Civil War ended, the US Army was the largest on the face of the earth. Foreign governments sent military experts to observe that war closely: they understood that they were witnessing the future of armed conflict in innovations such as the Gatling gun (an early machine gun) and trench warfare.

After 1865, the US Army and Navy shriveled to the point of insignificance. Here’s a paradox: for a nation of its size, the United States has been able to get away with an absurdly small military and still throw its weight around. Rarely has a nation been so fortunate in its enemies. When the United States finally did collide with a European power—Spain in 1898—it won decisively in a matter of months despite an embarrassingly clumsy mobilization. Victory in that war accelerated a trend toward acquiring overseas possessions that had begun with Alaska in 1867 and now extended to the Philippines. By the time of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the United States had reached the point of becoming a prominent second-tier power, behind Britain and Germany.

Enjoying oceans of protection from Great Power politics, the American people reacted to World War I with deep skepticism about intervention, notwithstanding a profitable trading relationship with Europe that resulted in a vast transfer of wealth to US advantage. After hesitating early in the war, Germany resumed attacks on Atlantic shipping to prevent US aid to England and France. American public opinion changed dramatically, and the United States went to war in 1917. The German high command gambled that the Americans would not be able to mobilize fast enough to stop a last-chance German offensive against Paris. Though plausible, that bet was a losing one: American troops arrived in force in 1918, re-energizing allies who flattened the Germans in a matter of months. Once again, the nation benefited from the weakness of others, this time the financially and militarily devastated European empires. President Woodrow Wilson and his supporters hoped that the United States would now assume a position of global leadership. But the deep grooves of public opinion, suspicious of what this might entail, rejected the League of Nations and the vision of international engagement that it represented, and Congress voted accordingly. The nation turned inward again, in large measure because it could afford to, for another generation.

Wages of War: Triumph over Germany and Japan

World War II proved to be a turning point in the nation’s relationship with the world. At first, it didn’t seem it would be. Over the course of the 1930s, volatile European powers—the Germans now under Nazi rule; the Soviet Union under the Communist Joseph Stalin; the British and French avoiding conflict with either while trying to prop up their sagging empires—lurched toward disaster. Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Japanese empire expanded across the Pacific, eating into northern and eastern China and threatening European interests, many of them petroleum-based, in Southeast Asia. None of this was enough to budge American public opinion, which strongly supported the Neutrality Acts passed by Congress in the second half of the 1930s, designed to handcuff the desire of internationalists—notably President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—from acting on their concern that the Nazi and Japanese regimes represented a bona fide threat to the United States.

Yet, by 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II in Europe, even the most committed of the so-called isolationists recognized the value of bolstering US defenses. In the first 2 years of the new decade, the US government stepped up building up its military capacity—reinstituting the draft, for example—and spending money on weapons. It certainly helped that rearmament also helped stimulate an economy that had never fully recovered from the Great Depression of the 1930s. With some difficulty, President Roosevelt managed to sell Congress on a program known as Lend-Lease—military aid to US allies in the form of loans or the transfer of assets such as naval bases—because it seemed cheaper and easier to have American allies do most of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, more high-minded advocates of internationalism advocated greater engagement, most famously Time magazine editor Henry Luce, who in a February 1941 article exhorted his fellow citizens to embrace the coming “American Century.”²

The United States finally did enter World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, years after the other principal combatants had attacked each other in the Atlantic and the Pacific. There is of course much to be said about this. For our purposes, what’s notable here is not simply that the United States prevailed in fighting across two oceans simultaneously, but the way it prevailed: by simply overwhelming its opponents with its sheer—yes, awesome—power. That power rested on a number of foundations. One of them was an impregnable geographic position (the Japanese managed to drop a total of four virtually harmless bombs into the woods of Oregon, the only ones ever to land on mainland soil during the war).³ Another was the size and competence of its armed forces, mobilized from a wide cross-section of society, that was notably well-fed, literate, and confident.

The most decisive aspect of US power, however, was an economic base that staggered its opponents. Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess, all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies. And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle. (Many observers consider the army with which Germany invaded Soviet Union, an ally it turned on in 1941, the finest the world has ever seen.) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself, but its allies, with whatever it took to win. By 1943, most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war-making.

Numbers alone tell a vivid story. For example, the United States absorbed what initially seemed like a crippling blow at Pearl Harbor, where hundreds of aircraft were damaged in a single day. And yet, within months, American contractors were building more planes every day than were lost in that attack, which had been planned for many years.⁴ A Liberty ship, used to carry cargo, took 355 days to build in 1941. Within a year, production time was cut to 56 days, and in one case a mere 2 weeks. (The construction quality was not as good, but US capacity was great enough for such assets to be considered disposable, an observation that was made of other kinds of US war production, such as tanks.⁵) The impact of this power may well have been even more dramatic in its impact on US allies. There is little question that the Soviets bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine, and that Soviet blood was indispensable to eventual victory. But the Soviets could not have prevailed without the 13 million pairs of boots, 5 million tons of food, 2,000 locomotives, 11,000 freight carriages, and 540,000 tons of rails—more than the Soviets laid between 1928 and 1939—that Americans provided, among other supplies, in 4 years of Lend-Lease, to say no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude: The Imperial Logic of the American Dream
• Part I: The Postwar Decades
• Part II: The Long 1960s
• Part III: Indian Summer
• Part IV: Present Tense
• Postlude: The Ends of the American Century
• Index
• End User License Agreement