Democratic Empire E-Book

Jim Cullen

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 866

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Prelude: The Imperial Logic of the American Dream

Part I: The Postwar Decades

1 Victory and Anxiety

Colony to Colonizer: American Rise to Globalism

Wages of War: Triumph over Germany and Japan

First Frost: Dawn of the Cold War

Seeing Red: The Cold War at Home

Playing with Dominoes: Cold War Hot Spots

Cold War Showdown: Cuba

Suggested Further Reading

2 Conformity and Rebellion

Best Worst Time: Early Postwar Years

Boom! The Postwar Economy Explodes

Rising Suburbs: Life on the Crabgrass Frontier

Restless in the Promised Land: Suburbia’s Critics

Free Movement: Early Civil Rights Struggles

Big Bangs: 1950s Youth Culture

Suggested Further Reading

Part II: The Long 1960s

3 Confidence and Agitation

Dishing: The Kitchen Debate as Domestic Squabble

American Prince: JFK

Grand Expectations: The Birth of “the Sixties”

Overcoming: The Civil Rights Movement Crests

Voices: Popular Culture of the Early 1960s

Countercurrents: Civil Rights Skeptics

Lone Star Rising: The LBJ Moment

Flanking Maneuver: Johnson in Vietnam

Fissures: Democratic Fault Lines

Suggested Further Reading

4 Fulfillment and Frustration

Over the Moon: Winning the Space Race

Imperial Quagmire: The Vietnam Wars

Down from the Mountaintop: The Civil Rights Movement

Turning Point: 1968

Right Rising: The Return of Richard Nixon

Women’s Work: The Feminist Movement

Rainbows: Rights Revolutions

Grim Peace: Endgame in Vietnam

Crooked Justice: The Triumph and Fall of Nixon

Suggested Further Reading

5 Experimentation and Exhaustion

The Great Divide: Establishment and Counterculture

(de)Construction Sites: The Rise of Postmodernism

System Failure: The Reorganization of Hollywood

Medium Dominant: Television

Fit Print: Publishing

Kingdom of Rebels: The Reign of Rock

Suggested Further Reading

6 Reassessment and Nostalgia

1973: Hinge of American History

Apocalypse Now: The New Gloom

Depressingly Decent: Ford and Carter

Solitary Refinement: The Me Decade

Body Politics: Gender and Its Discontents

Rebellion and Revival: Pop Culture of the Late Seventies

Right Signal: The Conservative Turn

Suggested Further Reading

Part III: Indian Summer

7 Revival and Denial

Right Man: The Age of Reagan

Making the Cut: Reaganomics

Breaking Ice: Reagan and the Cold War

Headwinds: Second-Term Blues

For God’s Sake: Social Conservatism

Left Ahead: The Legacy of the Sixties in the Eighties

Swan Song: Reagan and the Soviets

41: The (First) Bush Years

Freely Intervening: United States as Sole Superpower

Suggested Further Reading

8 Innovation and Nostalgia

Small Transformations: The Rise of the Personal Computer

Consuming Pleasures: Old Fashions, New Gadgets

Seeing Music: Music Television, or MTV

Yo! African American Culture and the Birth of Hip-Hop

Bourne in the USA: Dissident Voices

Suggested Further Reading

9 Prosperity and Distraction

Opposing Justice: The Hill–Thomas Imbroglio

Not Black and White: The Changing Colors of Race

Thug Life: Gangsta Rap

Running Saga: The O. J. Simpson Case

Family Matters: Demography and the Assault on Patriarchy

Culture War: The Fall of George Bush

Comeback Kid: The Rises and Falls of Bill Clinton

La Vida Loca

: The Roaring Nineties

Tech Sec: Toward the Internet

Insulated Intervention: US Foreign Policy

Recount: The 2000 Election

Suggested Further Reading

Part IV: Present Tense

10 Comfort and Dread

Towering Collapse: 9/11

Unknown Unknowns: The Iraq War

Spending Resources: The Debt Society

Bushed: Second-Term Blues

Downloading: Twenty-first Century Pop Culture

Posting: Web 2.0

Freely Unequal: The Tottering US Economy

Audacious Hopes: The Rise of Barack Obama

Future History: The Present as Past

Suggested Further Reading

Postlude: The Ends of the American Century

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 01

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.

Figure 1.2 OFF THE PAGE: Gregory Peck walks off the cover of the celebrated 1955 novel

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

to address the audience in the trailer for the film, released the following year. The story follows the struggle of Tom Rath (played by Peck), his wife Betsy (Jennifer Jones), and their family’s effort to establish a sense of stability in the corporate and suburban worlds of the 1950s (1956, directed by Nunnally Johnson, and produced by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation).

Chapter 02

Figure 2.1 HOMEWARD BOUND: Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) and Al Stephenson (Frederic March), all World War II veterans, share a plane back to the fictional Midwestern town of Boone City in the 1946 film

The Best Years of Our Lives

. Though war’s end brought relief and hope to many, it was also a time of uncertainty, even despair, for veterans and their families trying to rebuild their lives (1946, directed by William Wyler, and produced by The Samuel Goldwyn Company).

Figure 2.2 DOMESTIC STRUGGLE: Lena (“Mama”) Younger, played here by Claudia McNeil, expresses frustration in a scene from the 1961 film version of Lorraine Hanesberry’s 1959 play

A Raisin in the Sun

. Mama’s desire to buy her family a home catalyzes the plot of the story—and dramatizes the racism that the Youngers, and by extension all African American families, had to contend with at the dawn of the civil rights movement (directed by Daniel Petrie, and produced by Columbia Pictures Corporation).

Chapter 03

Figure 3.1 NIK AND DICK SHOW: US Vice President Richard Nixon (right) debates Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during their famous “Kitchen Debate” in July 1959. Their argument about the relative quality of life between the two superpowers demonstrated the intensity of the Cold War deep into the heart of everyday life in the mid-twentieth century.

Figure 3.2 CHANGIN’ MAN: Bob Dylan, 1965. The voice of the Baby Boom generation, Dylan engaged contemporary liberal politics with a timeless sensibility. That remained true even after he moved from folk music into rock and roll.

Chapter 04

Figure 4.1 ONE GIANT LEAP: Astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin standing on the moon after planting the American flag, July 20, 1969. The US effort to achieve a lunar landing, executed over the course of the 1960s, represented one of the nation’s greatest collective accomplishments.

Figure 4.2 BORN TO BE WILD: Peter Fonda (front) as Wyatt and Dennis Hopper as Billy at the start of

Easy Rider

. The 1969 movie was a landmark not only of the counterculture but also of the transformation of the Hollywood film industry (1969, directed by Dennis Hopper, produced by Pando Company Inc. [as Pando Company] and Raybert Productions).

Chapter 05

Figure 5.1 STARDUST: (Notably young) adolescents at Woodstock, August 18, 1969. The 3-day festival symbolized the charm—and, for some, the squalor—of the hippie life as the 1960s drew to a close, one that would have a significant influence on subsequent generations.

Figure 5.2 TEARFUL LAUGHTER: Mary Richards struggles with conflicting emotions during the hilarious “Chuckles the Clown Bites the Dust” episode of

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

(1975). Moore was a television pioneer who brought a feminist sensibility to the television industry as an actor and head (with husband Grant Tinker) of MTM Productions, a company that produced a string of successful television comedies and dramas (1970–1977, produced by MTM Enterprises, created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns).

Chapter 06

Figure 6.1 RUNNING ON EMPTY: An iconic image of the 1970s energy crisis. The combined shock of rising prices and constricted supply challenged Americans’ self-image as a people of plenty

Figure 6.2 LONER: An ominous-looking Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) attends a presidential candidate rally in a scene from

Taxi Driver

(1976). A commercial as well as critical success, the movie captured the profound sense of alienation that became increasingly evident during the mid-1970s, and the ending of the film, in particular, upended cherished national myths (1976, directed by Martin Scorsese, and produced by Columbia Pictures Corporation, Bill/Phillips, and Italo/Judeo Productions).

Chapter 07

Figure 7.1 COMMUNICATING: Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, 1986. Few Americans have ever dominated their time and place to the degree he did. “It can be done,” reads the sign on his desk. For better or worse, he did a lot. Credit: Carol M. Highsmith, photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figure 7.2 LATINA, FLOWERING: Sandra Cisneros at the Munich Botanical Garden in the 1990s. Since its original publication in 1984, her novel

The House on Mango Street

has become a perennial, selling millions of copies.

Chapter 08

Figure 8.1 TECHNOLOGICAL FRUIT: First-generation Apple Macintosh, 1984. This early personal computer revolutionized the computer industry much in the way the Model T did the automotive industry at the turn of the twentieth century, by offering consumers a relatively affordable, reliable, and convenient piece of machinery for everyday life. By Maxim75, Used under CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 8.2 MESSENGERS: Cover of the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 album

The Mess

age. The title track from the album has become a hip-hop classic for its path-breaking social commentary, establishing a new dimension for the emerging genre of rap music.

Chapter 09

Figure 9.1 TESTIFYING: Anita Hill appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the candidacy of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court, October 11, 1991. Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment galvanized the nation and highlighted the complex intersection of race and gender in US national life.

Figure 9.2 ROCKING: Liz Phair performing in Chicago, 2011. Her 1993 album

Exile in Guyville

, a response to the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album

Exile on Main Street

, became a feminist manifesto.

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 FLAGGING: Wreckage in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The most crippling single blow the United States sustained after Pearl Harbor, the attack was followed by a wave of national solidarity—and polarizing conflicts at home and abroad. US Navy photo by Journalist 1st Class Preston Keres [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 10.2 (MOB) FAMILY VALUES: Scene from “Made in America,” the final episode of

The Sopranos

(1999–2007). As the family gathers in a New Jersey diner, the man in a Members Only jacket in the upper-right-hand corner may or may not be responsible for what happens next (1999–2007, created by David Chase, and produced by Home Box Office [HBO], Brillstein Entertainment Partners, and The Park Entertainment).

Guide

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Also by Jim Cullen

The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (1995)

The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996)

Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997)

Popular Culture in American History (2001; Editor)

Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream (2001)

The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003)

The Fieldston Guide to American History for Cynical Beginners:

Impractical Lessons for Everyday Life (2005)

The Civil War Era: An Anthology of Sources (2005; Editor, with Lyde Cullen Sizer)

Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumph (2007)

Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think About History (2009)

Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (2013)

A Short History of the Modern Media (2014)

Democratic Empire

The United States Since 1945

Jim Cullen

This edition first published 2016© 2016 Jim Cullen

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cullen, Jim, 1962– author.Title: Democratic empire : the United States since 1945 / Jim Cullen.Description: Chichester, UK ; Malden, MA : John Wiley & Sons, 2016. |  Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015043946| ISBN 9781119027355 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119027348 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: United States–History–1945– | United States–Social conditions–1945– | United States–Politics and government–1945–1989. | United States–Politics and government–1989–Classification: LCC E741 .C84 2016 | DDC 973.92–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043946

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: © GraphicaArtis/Corbis

Acknowledgments

The textbook is a specific genre of historical writing—it’s a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship, for example, and it’s one intended more for the needs of the diploma-minded student than the pleasure-minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain). Writing a textbook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs: there’s stuff you know you have to do, stuff people are hoping to get, and it’s your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reinterpreting songs that are already out there. The accent in this book, as my musical analogy suggests, is a cultural one. But whatever the subfield in question—political history, social history, women’s history—my first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand, and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history: Bill McLoughlin, Jim Patterson, Jack Thomas, and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle, who accepted me into Brown’s American Civilization doctoral program. Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book. Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history. I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment.

I’d also like to thank my longtime editor, Peter Coveney, who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considerably more ambitious. This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that I’ve produced in the Wiley publishing stable; this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers, among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee, project editor Julia Kirk, copy editor Aravind Kannankara, and production editor Vimali Joseph. Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani.

This book was finished during a stay as a “Thinker in Residence” at Deakin University, with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the summer (well, actually, in the Australian winter) of 2015. My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton, who organized the trip, her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University, and the staff, faculty, and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable. The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years, and I’m grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there. Of particular note has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman, who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact-checking to providing excellent interpretative advice. The dedication of this volume to him is a necessarily insufficient gesture of gratitude.

A word in memoriam: I lost my beloved friend of 33 years, Gordon Sterling, while writing this book. He embodied what was best in our national life: optimism, decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind.

Lyde, Jay, Grayson, Ryland, and Nancy: you’re with me always—even at Starbucks, where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley, New York locations. I thank God for you, and for Grande Coffees, among other blessings.

—Jim CullenHastings-on-Hudson, New YorkJanuary, 2016

Prelude: The Imperial Logic of the American Dream

YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE. You probably don’t think of yourself that way, and there are some good reasons for that. So it’s worth considering those reasons before explaining why it’s helpful in terms of your past—and your future—to understand yourself as such.

One reason you don’t think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live. You are an American; more specifically, you are a resident of the United States (“America” being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile, even if common usage suggests otherwise), and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy. In fact, that’s not true. A democracy is a society in which all citizens—a term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of property, voting, and other privileges—have a say in making government decisions. The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens. Of course, the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves, women, or mere residents, none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small. Given the restricted number of people involved, Athenian democracy was a practical possibility: citizens could literally make their voices heard.

The United States, by contrast, is a republic, a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizens—more precisely, a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children, for example—who then make laws that apply collectively. The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens, even if it was still relatively small. (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution.) In the centuries that followed, the proportion of citizens grew steadily, and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story). Not only was that untrue, but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights, as even a cursory look at women’s history, immigration history, or that of US race relations makes clear.

And yet, for all this, the United States continues to be commonly described, by natives and observers alike, as a democracy. While this is not factually true, it does make sense in cultural terms, if not in political or social ones. Whether as a matter of folkways, foodways, or the popular media, the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs, and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center. It is one of the great ironies of American history, for example, that the period covered in this book, a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence, was decisively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people: American slaves. That’s why there’s some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always, or even often, in reality.