James T. Patterson - Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

Grand Expectations

The Oxford History of the United States

C. Vann Woodward, General Editor

Volume III
ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF
THE GLORIOUS CAUSE
The American Revolution, 17631789

Volume VI
JAMES MCPHERSON
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
The Civil War Era

Volume X
JAMES T. PATTERSON
GRAND EXPECTATIONS
The United States, 19451974

The United States, 19451974

JAMES T. PATTERSON

Oxford University Press

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Copyright 1996 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1996

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1997

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, James T.
Grand expectations : the United States, 19451974 /
James T. Patterson.
p. cm.(Oxford history of the United States; v. 10)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-10-507680-X
ISBN 0-19-511797-2 (Pbk.)
1. United StatesHistory1945- I. Title. II. Series.
E173.094 vol. 10 [E741] 973.92dc20 9513878

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To Cynthia, with love

My title, Grand Expectations, tries to capture the main theme of this book, that the majority of the American people during the twenty-five or so years following the end of World War II developed ever-greater expectations about the capacity of the United States to create a better world abroad and a happier society at home. This optimism was not altogether new: most Americans, living in a land of opportunity, have always had great hopes for the future. But high expectations, rooted in vibrant economic growth, ascended as never before in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s, an extraordinarily turbulent decade during which faith in the wealth of the United Statesand in the capacity of the federal government to promote progressaroused unprecedented rights-consciousness on the home front. America's political leaders, meanwhile, managed to stimulate enormous expectations about the nation's ability to direct world affairs. More than ever beforeor sinceAmericans came to believe that they could shape the international scene in their own image as well as fashion a more classless, equal opportunity society.

I call this grand quest for opportunity at home a rights revolution. It affected all manner of Americans, including people who were disadvantagedminorities, the poor, women, and many othersand who demanded greater access to the ever-richer society that was glittering around them. The quest resulted in significant and lasting improvement in the economic and legal standing of millions of people. No comparable period of United States history witnessed so much economic and civic

Throughout these years, however, the revolution in expectations confronted stubborn forces that blocked the most grandiose of personal dreams. There were limits after all. In the postwar era, as before, social cleavages beset the United States, one of the world's vastest and most heterogeneous nations. Racial conflicts in particular polarized American life. Other long-standing divisionsof gender, region, religion, ethnicity, and classgrew increasingly glaring, especially in the 1960s. And frightening international tensions, anchored in a Cold War, lasted throughout the postwar years. These tensions inspired some creative statecraft, but they also nourished extremes, such as McCarthyism, and they provoked terrible blunders, notably vast escalation of war in Vietnam. Both the internal divisions and the blunders aroused dissension and enlarged the gap between what people expected and what they managed to accomplish.

Many of the grand expectations survived the turbulent 1960s; activists for environmental protection and women's rights, for instance, achieved considerable visibility in the early 1970s. Also surviving, however, were strongly held traditional ideas: faith in the virtue of hard work, belief in self-help and individualism, conservative religious values. Popular doubts intensified about the postwar rise of large, centralized government. The rights revolution, moreover, helped to stir backlash from people who resented what they considered to be the demands of groups for special privileges. And the Vietnam War widened a "credibility gap" between what America's leaders said they were doing and what in fact they were doing. This gap, already profound by 1968, grew enormous when President Richard Nixon tried to cover up the involvement of his aides in the scandal of Watergate. These events deepened a popular distrust of governmentand of elites in generalthat in varying forms has lasted to our own times.

The economy, a driving force behind the rise of expectations from 1945 to the late 1960s, also developed worrisome problems by the early 1970s. These problemswhich stymied economic growth in the mid- and late 1970sdid not destroy either the grand expectations or the rights-consciousness that had mushroomed since 1945. Demands for rights, sharply whetted during the previous decades, remained as enduring legacies of the postwar era. But popular uneasiness about the economy did more than any other development of the 1970s to dull the extraordinary optimism that had peaked in the mid-1960s. Therein lay a central feature of the more somber culture that emerged after 1974: rising tension between still grand expectations on the one hand and unyielding social divisions, traditional beliefs, and economic uncertainty on the other. From the early 1970s to our own times Americans have displayed an often rancorous disillusion. Much of the older optimism has abated. We live in a more troubled and often more contentious society.

Providence, R.I.
October 1995

Jim Patterson

Many people have helped to make this book possible. I am grateful first to the expert staff of the Brown University History Department: Camille Dickson, Cherrie Guerzon, Karen Mota, and Fran Wheaton, who handled my many requestsespecially concerning printing, copying, and mailingwith efficiency and good humor. Several graduate students in the History Department served expertly as research assistants and critics of earlier drafts. They are Lucy Barber, James Sparrow, David Witwer, and Bernard Yamron, who also expertly compiled the index. Larry Small, a Brown undergraduate at the time, proved to be an outstanding research aide as a summer intern. India Cooper was a first-rate copy editor and Joellyn Ausanka provided excellent additional editorial assistance. Andrew Albanese, assistant editor of the Oxford University Press, ably took charge of many important matters, including photographs and maps, and shepherded the manuscript through its many stages of production.