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

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James T. Patterson Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974
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Beginning in 1945, America rocketed through a quarter-century of extraordinary economic growth, experiencing an amazing boom that soared to unimaginable heights in the 1960s. At one point, in the late 1940s, American workers produced 57 percent of the planets steel, 62 percent of the oil, 80 percent of the automobiles. The U.S. then had three-fourths of the worlds gold supplies. English Prime Minister Edward Heath later said that the United States in the post-War era enjoyed the greatest prosperity the world has ever known. It was a boom that produced a national euphoria, a buoyant time of grand expectations and an unprecedented faith in our government, in our leaders, and in the American dream--an optimistic spirit which would be shaken by events in the 60s and 70s, and particularly by the Vietnam War.
Now, in Grand Expectations, James T. Patterson has written a highly readable and balanced work that weaves the major political, cultural, and economic events of the period into a superb portrait of America from 1945 through Watergate. Here is an era teeming with memorable events--from the bloody campaigns in Korea and the bitterness surrounding McCarthyism to the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, to the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Nixons resignation. Patterson excels at portraying the amazing growth after World War II--the great building boom epitomized by Levittown (the largest such development in history) and the baby boom (which exploded literally nine months after V-J Day)--as well as the resultant buoyancy of spirit reflected in everything from streamlined toasters, to big, flashy cars, to the soaring, butterfly roof of TWAs airline terminal in New York. And he shows how this upbeat, can-do mood spurred grander and grander expectations as the era progressed.
Of course, not all Americans shared in this economic growth, and an important thread running through the book is an informed and gripping depiction of the civil rights movement--from the electrifying Brown v. Board of Education decision, to the violent confrontations in Little Rock, Birmingham, and Selma, to the landmark civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Patterson also shows how the Vietnam War--which provoked LBJs growing credibility gap, vast defense spending that dangerously unsettled the economy, and increasingly angry protests--and a growing rights revolution (including demands by women, Hispanics, the poor, Native Americans, and gays) triggered a backlash that widened hidden rifts in our society, rifts that divided along racial, class, and generational lines. And by Nixons resignation, we find a national mood in stark contrast to the grand expectations of ten years earlier, one in which faith in our leaders and in the attainability of the American dream was becoming shaken.
The Oxford History of the United States
The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship, a series that synthesizes a generations worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book. Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.

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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

GRAND EXPECTATIONS

The United States, 19451974

JAMES T. PATTERSON

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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

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of Oxford University Press.

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

Permission to reprint lyrics from the following is gratefully acknowledged:

"Camelot" (Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe).
Copyright 1960, 1961 Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe (Renewed).
All rights administered by Chappell & Co.
All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

"Eve of Destruction." Words and Music by P. F. Sloan.
Copyright 1965 by Duchess Music Corporation. Duchess Music Corporation
is an MCA company.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

"The Times They Are a-Changin'." Bob Dylan, author.
1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Music. Copyright renewed 1991 Special Rider Music.

7 8 9 10

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Cynthia, with love

Preface

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

Acknowledgments

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.

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