Wn American Prose since 1945 THE UNITED STATES AND WORLD POWER Distribution of power is a purpose of war, and the consequences of a world war are necessarily global. Having agreed to a policy of unconditional sur- render, the allied countries of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States positioned themselves to achieve nothing short of total victory over their enemies in World War Il: Germany and Japan. Yet each country’s con- tribution to victory made for startling contrasts in the following half century. Britain, beleaguered since the war's start in September 1939, fought against odds that depleted its resources and severely disrupted its traditional class structure. The Soviet Union, an amalgamation of nations under the central power of Russia, suffered the war's worst casualties when attacked by Ger- many in June 194] and afterward during the hideous contest of attrition along the war's bitter eastern front well into 1945. Although newly estab- lished as a world power after the end of hostilities, the U.S.S.R. remained at an economic disadvantage and dissolved in 1991 after five decades of Cold War against its ideological adversaries in the West. It was the United States, entering the war after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that emerged as a world power in excellent economic shape. This new power, experienced both at home and abroad, became a major force in reshaping American culture for the balance of the twentieth century. The great social effort involved in fighting World War II reorganized Amer- ica’s economy and altered its people’s lifestyles. Postwar existence revealed different kinds of men and women, with new aspirations among both major- ind minority populations, New possibilities for action empowered indi- viduals and groups in the pursuit of personal freedom and individual self-expression. During World War II American industry had expanded dra- matically for military purposes; plants that had manufactured Chevrolets, Plymouths, Studebakers, Packards, and Fords now made B-24 Liberators and Grumman Avengers. With three million men in uniform, the vastly expanded workforce comprised increasing numbers of women. After hostil- ities were concluded many of these women were reluctant to return to home- making; after a decade or so of domesticity, women emerged as a political force on behalf of rights and opportunities in the workplace. This pattern extended to other groups as well. African Americans, whether they enlisted or were drafted, served in fighting units throughout the war and were unwill- ing to return to second-class status afterward; nor could a majority culture aware of their contribution continue to enforce segregation and other forms of prejudice so easily as before the war. F Economic power at the world level continued to influence American cul- ture through the first two postwar decades. The first two—and only two— atomic bombs were exploded in Japan in August 1945; their effect was so 19531954 / AMERICAN Prose sINcE 1945 horrific that a strategy of geographical “containment” emerged as a mi policy. When Communist North Korea invaded South Korea ir at) therefore, the United States rejected responding with atomic weapons in favor of a United Nations—sponsored “police action” that fought with con- ventional weapons only and declined to pursue enemy forces beyond specific boundaries, But if hot war was out, cold war was in, specifically the type of contest in which military strength was built up for deterrence rather than combat. Here economic conduct would be a major factor in the American decision to contain the Soviet Union's attempt to expand its influence. In the years following World War II the U.S.S.R. had assumed a stance con- sidered adversarial to Western interests. Ideologically) the opposition was between Western capitalism and Soviet state socialism{ militarily, the contest exhibited itself in the West's rebuilding of Germany and the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) versus the Soviet Union's influ- ence over Eastern Europe's nations by means of the Warsaw Pact) Geopo- litically, the U.S.8.R. sponsored the formation of socialist governments in what became known as its satellite nations of Poland, Hungary, and Czech- oslovakia, separated by what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill char- acterized as an Iron Curtain inhibiting contact with the democracies of Western Europe. In Africa, where new nations gained independence from colonial rule, West and East competed for influence. Overall, the West per- ceived a threat in the U.S.S.R.’s 1948 attainment of nuclear weaponry and its maintenance of massive troop strength beyond its-borders. When Com- munist revolutionaries took control of mainland China in 1949, the Cold War moved beyond European boundaries to encompass the entire globe. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, economic warfare motivated Ameri- can activity as decisively as had the waging of World War II ‘Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, social critics perceived a stable conformity to American life, a dedication to an increasingly materi- alistic standard of living, whose ethical merit was ensured by a continuity with the prewar world—a continuity that proved to be delusory. In this initial postwar period white males benefited especially from the economy and saw the nature of their lives change. The G.I. Bill provided veterans with a college education; after World War IT America would eventually have as much as 50 percent of its population college educated, a percentage unthinkable in ‘prewar years and unmatched by any other nation. With world markets open to American goods, the expanded economy offered sophisticated technical and professional jobs for these college graduates; within a generation the alphabet soup of great corporations—IT&T, GE, RCA, IBM, and so forth— came to dominate employment patterns at home and around the globe. Higher incomes and demographic expansion created vast new suburbs beyond the limits of older cities, and the population of the United States began a westward shift. New roads accommodated this increasingly mobile society, including the interstate highway system begun in 1955. By 1960 the average American family was moving to a new place of residence at the rate ‘of once every five years, as new opportunities beckoned and lifestyles expanded beyond the more traditional stability of “home.” An age of plenty created a new managerial class, but also ensured an ample piece of the pie for workers protected by well-organized, secure unions. Named for the man who served as president from 1953 to 1961, the early postwar period came to be known as the “Eisenhower Era.” Dwight D. Eisen- SNTTTNyITNInrropuction / 1955 hower had commanded the Allied forces during their push to total victory in World War II. Comparatively apolitical, he was asked to run as. a Democratic presidential candidate in 1948 before accepting the Republican nomination in 1952. His impact on American culture of the 1950s suggested the pres- ence of a benign father figure who had fought to make the world secure and who now could preside over its enjoyment of achieved ideals. At home, he provided federal funds to build freeways that swept suburban workers home from their city jobs. Militarily, he was commander-in-chief of a globally pow- erful but never-used force, the Strategic Air Command, a fleet of bombers up to half of which were in the air at all times, poised to deliver a nuclear strike measured in how many times over it could annihilate an enemy. Yet education was a weapon, too, and when the Soviet Union’s1957 lunch of the Sputnik satellite suggested the West was lagging behind, a new tech- nology race began that reendowed American schools and colleges with rich resources and a crucial sense of commitment. Also during this era the move- ment for African American civil rights, directed to overturning legislated segregation in the South rather than reforming de facto abuses throughout the country, proceeded through local court action and only occasionally with federal involvement. The push was on to return women to a domesticity made pleasurable by new labor-saving machinery and consumer goods. But ways of life consonant with an isolated, stable economy could not survive in the new atmosphere of American power and wealth. The passage from the 1950s to the 1960s marks the great watershed of the postwar half century.|Conflicts between conformity and individuality, tradition and inno- vation, stability and disruption were announced and anticipated even before they effectively influenced history and culture. The earliest harbinger was the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president. Former senator from Massachusetts, heir to a large (but comparatively recently made) family for- tune, Kennedy was a generation younger and immensely more glamorous than Eisenhower. To a mainstream society that might have become compla- cent with the material success of Eisenhower's years and had neglected the less fortunate, Kennedy offered an energetic program of involvement. For- mally titled ‘The New Frontier,’ it reached from the participation of indi- vidual Americans in the Peace Corps (working to aid underdeveloped countries around the world) to the grand effort at conquering space. In the midst of his brief presidency, in October 1962, the Soviet Union installed ballistic missiles in Cuba; when Kennedy protested this act and began a naval blockade of the island nation, the possibility of nuclear warfare came closer than ever before, until the U.S.S.R. relented and withdrew its weapons. Domestic tensions also rose when Robert Kennedy, the president's brother and U.S. attorney general, took a newly activist approach toward desegre- gation, sending federal troops into the South to enforce the law. But there was a cultural grace to the Kennedy era as well, with the president’s wife, Jacqueline, making involvement in the arts not just fashionable but also a matter of government policy. Thé Si they are known, really began with the assassination of John F. Kennédyon November 22, 1963. The tumultuous dozen years of Ameri- can history that followed embraced a more combative period in civil rights, climaxing with the most sustained and effective attempts to remedy the evils of racial discrimination since the years of Reconstruction after the Civil War. For the first time since the Suffrage movement following World War I,