th
1
20 Century Notes
Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions,
1917-1933 Second Edition (1992)
Argument: “My purpose in the following pages is to reexamine America’s historical development during the years from 1917 to
1933, focusing in particular on wartime mobilization and action, the rise and collapse of the world’s first mass consumption economy,
and the continued search for a modern managerial order geared to the realization of liberal ideals. This search moved away from the
paths projected by the New Nationalists and New Freedomites of the prewar period. But from the wartime experience came an
enhanced vision of enlightened private orders enlisted in the national service and working with public agencies to advance the
common good, and the economic expansion of the postwar period seemed to support this vision. Not until the subsequent economic
contraction had unmasked the weaknesses in New Era ideology and practice did the search move onto other paths. Even then it could
not ignore the legacy left by New Era organizers and policy makers. Much of what followed would consist of increased support for
those still seeking to realized the New Era vision, and much that did break from this pattern would be limited and shaped by the
organizational framework erected between 1917 and 1933.” V
• “In the domestic sphere, New Era policy makers—with Herbert Hoover the key figure—were animated by the “vision of
enlightened private orders enlisted in the national service and working with public agencies to advance the common good” as
an alternative to a rudderless and anarchical laissez-faire and an initiative-stifling, freedom destroying statism.” 181-182,
Braeman
• “For some it was the dividing line between an era of reform and one of reaction, for others the threshold of a new urban and
managerial order, and for still others the end of a promising epoch of human progress and the beginning of an era in which
the forces of progress were nearly submerged by irrational destruction and social malignancies.” 1
• “In the business sphere, the prewar search for greater order had brought forth three elites, each aspiring to the role once filled
by master entrepreneurs and leaders of local communities. For many businessmen and for business-supported social science,
the great enemies had become “social chaos,” “destructive competition,” and “defective coordination.” It was these disorders
that were threatening both liberty and progress, and in different ways the developments that brought forth master financiers,
systematic managers, and associational bureaucracies were all responses to these perceptions of social need and group
interest.” 5
• “the new financial elite had won substantial acceptance as part of a new and more socially conscious national leadership.
During the panic of 1907 it had been called on to check economic demoralization. Subsequently it had become a partner of
the State Department in efforts to stabilize troublesome areas abroad, and under the new Federal Reserve Act of 1913 it was
to work with public representatives in exercising expert and apolitical controls over the money supply and credit
availability…a second and at times competing elite was also emerging, primarily in the large corporate organizations with
their expanding array of technical specialists coordinated and directed by professional administrators…The third
development in the business sphere was an immense growth of business associations.” 6
• “Culturally, then, the heritage of the Progressive Era consisted of mounting tensions between the established order of the
Victorian age and the challenges posed by immigrations, the activism of submerged minorities and women’s groups, and the
attitudes emanating from cultural modernists and promoters of a pleasure ethic.” 12
• “If the Progressive Era laid the basis for modern America, the war experience of 1917 and 1918 catalyzed the process of
organizational change and set the pattern for future economic and social management. It brought, above all, a new reliance
on the private organizational elites that had emerged in the prewar years.” 16
• “In large measure the wartime pressure for organizational change stemmed from two decisions about the type of war that the
nation would attempt to fight. In the first place, it was decided, the stream of war materiel moving across the Atlantic must
be substantially expanded…Second, it was decided shortly thereafter, the United States must raise a large expeditionary force
and deploy it to France. Without such actions, so the reasoning ran, the war could not be brought to a successful conclusion,
nor could America expect to play a major role in shaping the peace. The consequences, however, were to subject the
economy to massive demands for a new type of consumerism, and from the outset it was widely conceded that trying to meet
these demands through existing economic and political institutions was likely to bring economic chaos and social breakdown.
• “Whether or not Wilson himself was responsible, his vision of a new international order would remain unrealized. Taking
shape instead would be two weaker and more national-oriented systems, one built around the Anglo-French alliance and their
extension of the League apparatus, the other around a new set of American-sponsored treaties, expert commissions, and
cooperative arrangements.” 36
• “[By 1919] Unions no longer had government support; they were being blamed for the rising cost of living and lagging
productivities, and to a public inflamed with anti-Bolshevik hysteria the distinction between good American unions and those
bent on social revolution had become increasingly blurred. The stage was set for major labor defeats. In late 1919, as the
issue of communism diverted more attention from legitimate grievances, unionism suffered one setback after another. The
great steel strike, which began on September 22, was soon crumbling under the weight of massive public disapproval, stern
repression of union activities, and armed protection for strikebreakers.” 39
• “Historians have long looked on the presidency of Warren G. Harding as a major debacle. “Normalcy,” they have explained
in great detail, really meant the transfer of government to corrupt officials, incompetents, and rapacious special interests.
Often missing from their accounts is the fact that the Harding era also came close to combining full employment and rising
living standards with stable prices and international peace.” 47
2
“Beneath the surface indications of stability, however, the economy of 1928 was already in deep trouble. Markets for the
new mass production industries—for automobiles, appliances, radios, and similar items—were already becoming saturated.
The call for capital in these industries and ancillary fields was slackening. And new areas of spending that could take up the
slack were failing to develop.” 80
• Hoover wanted to 1. End poverty and 2. Achieve equality. 128
• “The Hooverites, it now seemed clear, were not the laissez-faire fundamentalists excoriated in New Deal rhetoric. Nor were
the New Dealers the collectivizing anti-capitalists depicted in Hooverian oratory…Far from being an application of socialist
theory or a radical kind of redistributionism, much of the early New Deal might more aptly be labeled “Hooverism in high
gear.”…the transfer of power in 1933 stands as a major watershed. It marked the end of efforts to implement a “new
liberalism” that in theory could allow Americans to meet modern needs without developing a welfare and regulatory state. It
removed the barriers against the kind of government-backed cartelization, public works spending, and administrative state
that the outgoing administration had strongly resisted.” 188
Sources: synthesis
Connections: Kennedy, Over Here, Leuchtenburg, Perils, Grossman, Land, Lehman, Promised, Cohen, Making, Brinkley, End,
Leuchtenburg, FDR
•
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980)
Argument: “My premise was that the urgency of the war crisis sharpened many of the questions that had roiled American society in
the preceding two decades, especially, those that dealt with the relations between government and civil society. It followed that a
study of wartime America might lay bare the core assumptions, ambitions, and limitations of the progressive mentality—and of the
modern liberal tradition which it did so much to shape—with more clarity than they exhibited in peacetime.” 374-375
• “Wilson had waited so long for war with reason. “It was necessary for me,” he wrote a friend, “by very slow stages indeed
and with the most genuine purpose to avoid war to lead the country on to a single way of thinking.”…Moreover, the United
States in 1917 stood at the end of two decades of extraordinarily divisive political and social upheaval. Deep social fissures
had been opened by the enormous concentration of private capital and economic power in “trusts,” by the efforts of
progressive reformers to bring the corporations under public control, by labor disturbances, and by the arrival in America of
over twelve million immigrants since the turn of the century.” 11
• ““Every reform we have won,” Wilson had said as early as 1914, “will be lost if we go into this war. We have been making a
fight on special privilege. We have got new tariff and currency and trust legislation. We don’t yet know how they will work.
They are not thoroughly set.”” 11
• “The Espionage Act, as it was known when finally enacted into law on June 5, 1917, furnished the government with ample
instrumentalities for the suppression of those who opposed the war…The Socialist Party was among the first groups to feel
the whip of official wrath…During the summer months of 1917, the Post Office Department withdrew the mailing privileges
of more than a dozen socialist publications, including major organs like Appeal to Reason, which had a prewar weekly
circulation of more than half a million.” 26-27
• “Support for the war, Gompers believed, provided the opportunity to gain for labor a voice in the making of defense policy, a
modicum of assurance that, as he told the A.F. of L. executive committee, war measures would not be exclusively drawn up
by people “out of sympathy with the needs and ideals of the workers.” In return for its cooperation, Gompers reasoned, the
trade-union movement could ask for stronger government guarantees of the right to organize and bargain collectively and for
the preservation of union standards of pay and working conditions…Gompers knew that to realize the opportunities the war
afforded, he needed a united labor movement behind him.” 28
• “Many blacks, for example, contemplated with horror the prospect of a war-fueled wave of lynching and terrorism, as rumors
swept the South in the spring of 1917 of a German plot to set the country ablaze with a black insurrection. But other blacks
saw in the war a great opportunity, “a God-sent blessing,” as one Negro newspaper put it, to earn white regard and advance
the standing of the race by valiant wartime service. The Central Committee of Negro College Men petitioned Woodrow
Wilson and the War Department “to establish a special officers’ training camp of the training of colored officers for the
colored regiments in the New Federal Army.” Though their ultimate goal was the eradication of Jim Crow, said the
committee “our young men are so anxious to serve their country in this crisis that they are willing to accept a separate camp.
• “Europe had always represented to Americans a version of that very ethos—a perverted version, to be sure, one that
exemplified the perils of regimentation, the miseries of individual unfreedom from which millions had fled westerly across
the Atlantic, but a model nonetheless of the social philosophy that many people found so harmfully absent in the United
States.”44
• “To an unusual degree, the Progressive Era was economically innovative, culturally protean, politically tumultuous, and
intellectually fecund. It was the moment when modernity irrevocably overtook American society, compelling wrenching
changes in familiar ways of life, values, and institutions…In the years around the turn of the century, the rapidly maturing
industrial revolution compelled a nation of farmers to transform itself into a nation of city-dwelling factory employees and
office workers.” 373
• “many historians have seen in the Progressive Era the incubator of modern America society, and in progressivism the
harbinger of twentieth-century political liberalism. It is now clear that the progressives adjusted only imperfectly to the
abundant challenges they faced. But it is not too much to say that they invented much of the vocabulary, grammar, and
3
syntax, and at least the rudiments of the institutional apparatus, with which their descendants comprehended and coped with
the remainder of the twentieth century.” 374
• “The structures that had sustained the long European peace of the nineteenth century were visibly crumbling, ironically
enough, under the pressure of two nineteenth-century creations: the industrial revolution and nationalism.” 376
• “The war against Spain announced America’s debut on the stage of world affairs…The Spanish-American War merely
confirmed the world’s growing sense that the Americans had acquired the capacity to work their will well beyond their own
shores. Whether they had the stomach to continue doing so, and to what purposes, were other questions, answers to which
the prevailing powers now anxiously sought.” 378
• “The United States had grown to maturity in a uniquely isolated and secure environment. It had even managed to fight its
civil war without foreign intervention, a rare accomplishment in the annals of nation-states. Shielded by two oceans with no
powerful neighbors to fear, it had been undistractedly absorbed for more than a century in the great project of consolidating
its own continental domain, with scant energy or interest to spare for events elsewhere. Those peculiar historical
circumstances had bred stubborn habits of mind, including the cherished belief that the United States could choose whether,
when, and how to participate in the world.” 378-379
• “America, in short, should jettison its isolationist heritage, embrace its standing as a great power, and behave in the only way
such a power could…As president, [Theodore] Roosevelt sought to amplify American strength and make the weight of the
United States felt in the geopolitical scales. He secured the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, announced the “Roosevelt
Corallary” to Monroe Doctrine in 1904, mediated an armistice in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, intervened in a European
squabble over Africa the following year, and in 1907 dispatched the “Great White Fleet” to flex America’s naval muscle
around the world.” 380
• “When he left office in 1909, he regarded it as among the principal disappointments of his presidency that he had not
succeeded in turning the United States away from the isolationist alters at which it had long worshipped.” 381
• “Two bedrock assumptions underlay Wilson’s thinking: that the circumstances of the modern era were utterly novel, and that
providence had entrusted America with a mandate to carry out a singular mission in the world.” 382
• “The advent of mass democracy, meanwhile, had made modern governments inescapably beholden to their electorates.
Avoiding war thus became diplomacy’s supreme objective, and attending to public opinion became an indispensable element
of statecraft.” 383
• “The unshakable conviction of Americans that they were a people apart, anointed by history with a special destiny, could
logically yield only tow possible diplomatic consequences: isolationism, in order to preserve America’s uniqueness, its
innocence, and its ideological purity; or messianic universalism, in order to translate America’s national achievements into
the international arena.” 387
• “In the end, of course, Wilson, like Theodore Roosevelt, failed to wean his country from its commitment to isolation. The
Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty and refuse to take the United States into the League of Nations. The United States did
not merely revert to isolationism in the years after World War I; it entered what was arguably the most isolationist phase of
its history. It testily insisted that the Allied governments repay their wartime debts to the United States Treasury, even at the
price of gravely disrupting international financial markets and capital flows. It enacted the forbiddingly high Smoot-Hawley
Tariff in 1930, seriously aggravating the worldwide Great Depression. It deliberately stood aloof from the gathering crisis
that became World War II, entering that conflict only when attacked and, as in World War I, more than two years after the
war’s outbreak.” 387
Sources: government papers, speeches, newspapers, propaganda
Connections: Hawley, The Great War, Leuchtenburg, Perils, Cohen, Making, Grossman, Land of Hope, Lehman, Promised,
Brinkley, End, Leuchtenburg, FDR
William E. Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 (1958)
Argument: “The age itself [1914-1932], Mr. Leuchtenburg reminds us, cannot be taken in isolation from its past and future. He finds
movements in the period which reach back to the nineteenth century: the rise of the city, the change from handicraft to assembly lines,
the ascent to the world stage. He sees the beginnings of institutions which would produce the New Deal and with it the changed
attitude toward government that has stayed with us ever since. For him the age was not a frolic, in which a people stepped out of
character, but a climax of passions long brewing.” vi
• “one unifying theme of the book: that the kind of prosperity experienced by that generation contributed to the concentration
of power in a “business class with little tradition of social leadership,” to the investment of world power in a nation unready
to assume its responsibilities, to the triumph of a shallow and vulgar culture in which money became the measure of man.”
522, Chambers
• “Leuchtenburg portrays the years 1914-1932 as an era of transition, tension, and paradox. It marked an uncomfortable way
station between a nation predominately rural, traditional, and provincial, fundamentalist in its religion, with a premium still
on the virtues of craftsmanship, neighborliness, and equalitarianism, and an America urban, mechanized, secular, and
sophisticated. The nation’s reform impulse was in transition from “old-style evangelical reformism,” not yet dead, to a “newstyle urban progressivism,” not yet fully arrived. Its tensions and insecurities arose out of the acceleration of historical
change. Its paradoxes are explained as the reluctance or incapacity of the American people to come to terms with the new
realities of American life: “a strong state, the dominance of the metropolis, secularization and the breakdown of religious
sanctions, the loss of authority of the family, industrial consolidation, international power politics, and mass culture.” 522
4
“the supremacy of rural, small-town America was being challenged by the rise of the city to the dominant position in
American life. The city represented a challenge for economic power: the determination of finance capitalism to regain the
political pre-eminence it had forfeited in the Progressive era. The city threatened to disrupt class stability through the
tumultuous drive by unskilled labor to form mighty industrial unions. The city imperiled the hierarchy of social status
through the clamor of new immigrant groups for social acceptance. Most of all, the older America was alarmed by the mores
of the metropolis. The city represented everything—Europe, Wall Street, religious skepticism, political radicalism,
sophistication, intellectual arrogance—which prewar America feared most.” 7-8
• “”Even more important, a century of tranquility had taught the country that it was safe from the threat of foreign invasion and
that it need have no concern with the disorders of Europe.” 9
• “Through the decade, the United States moved quietly away from the rigid isolationism of 1920. By 1930, the United States
had participated in more than forty League conferences, and by the following year, there were five permanent American
officials in Geneva.” 10
• “American entrance into the war cannot be seen apart from the American sense of mission. The United States believed that
American moral idealism could be extended outward, that American Christian democratic ideals could and should be
universally applied. This sense of national mission was combined with a new consciousness of national power.” 34
• “The war for democracy had ended in triumph, and the way was now cleared for the creation of the great postwar federation
of nations.” 49
• “Wilson’s most spectacular triumph had come when the Conference on January 25, 1919, voted to incorporate the League of
Nations as an integral part of the treaty.” 56
• “The 1920s represent not the high tide of laissez-faire but of Hamiltonianism, of a hierarchical concept of society with a
deliberate pursuit by the government of policies most favorable to large business interests. No political party, no national
administration, could conceivably have been more co-operative with business interests.” 103
• “American foreign policy in the 1920’s was build on disillusionment with World War I—a dirty, unheroic war which few
men remembered with any emotion save distaste. There had been earlier wars which, no matter how great the cost, the nation
recalled with affection. This was a war it chose to forget.” 104
• “The war left a determination in millions of American never to fight again; at no time in our history has the hold of pacifism
been stronger than in the interlude between the first and second world wars.” 104
• “Even more important, it left a deep cynicism about American participation in European affairs, a cynicism caught in the
statement attributed to Lloyd George at Versailles: “Is it Upper or Lower Selisia that we are giving away?”” 105
• “The revolution in morals routed the worst of Victorian sentimentality and false modesty. It mitigated the harsh moral
judgments of rural Protestantism, and it all but wiped out the awful combination of sanctimoniousness and lewdness which
enabled Anthony Comstock to defame Bernard Shaw as “this Irish smut-dealer” and which allowed Teddy Roosevelt, with
unconscious humor, to denounce the Mexican bandit Villa as a “murderer and a bigamist.”” 176
• “After World War I, the United States, reaping the harvest of half a century of industrial progress, achieved the highest
standard of living any people had ever known. National income soared from $480 per capita in 1900 to $681 in 1929.” 178
• “The aftermath of the Scopes trial is symbolic of the fate of political fundamentalism in the 1920’s. Immigration restriction,
the Klan, prohibition, and Protestant fundamentalism all had in common a hostility to the city and a desire to arrest change
through coercion by statute. The anti-evolutionists won the Scopes trial; yet, in a more important sense, they were defeated,
overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism. Such was the fate of each of the other movements. By the end of 1933 the
Eighteenth Amendment had been repealed and the Klan was a dim memory. Immigration restriction, which apparently
scored a complete triumph and certainly did win a major one, was frustrated when (since the law did not apply to the Western
Hemisphere) Mexicans, French Canadians, and Puerto Ricans, most of them “swarthy” Catholics, streamed in. Ostensibly
successful on every front, the political fundamentalists in the 1920’s were making a last stand in a lost cause against the
legions of the city.” 224
• “Never was a decade snuffed out so quickly as the 1920’s. The stock market crash was taken as a judgment pronounced on
the whole era, and, in the grim days of the depression, the 1920’s were condemned as a time of irresponsibility and
immaturity.” 269
• “It was a time of paradoxes: an age of conformity and of liberation, of the persistence of rural values and the triumph of
laissez faire but also of government intervention, of competition and of merger, of despair and of joyous abandon. Many of
the apparent paradoxes can be explained by the reluctance of the American people to accept the changes that were occurring
and by their attempt to hold on to older ways of thought and action at the same time that they were, often against their will,
committed to new ones.” 272
• “The 1920’s, despite rhetoric to the contrary, marked the end of nineteenth-century liberalism…Hoover sounded the praises
of laissez faire and business-minded administrators like Andrew Mellon attempted to diminish the role of government, the
state continued relentlessly to augment its power. Both the civil and military functions of the federal government doubled
between 1915 and 1930.” 272
Sources: synthesis, papers, treaties
Connections: Kennedy, Over Here, Hawley, The Great War, Grossman, Land of Hope, Lehman, Promised, Cohen, Making, Brinkley,
End, Leuchtenburg, FDR
•
John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986)
5
Argument: “In countless ways, war words and race words came together in a manner which did not just reflect the savagery of the
war, but contributed to it by reinforcing the impression of a truly Manichaean struggle between completely incompatible antagonists.
The natural response to such a vision was an obsession with extermination on both sides—a war without mercy.” 11
• “To understand how racism influence the conduct of the war in Asia has required going beyond the formal documents and
battle reports upon which historians normally rely and drawing on materials such as songs, movies, cartoons, and a wide
variety of popular as well as academic writings published at the time.” X
• “To nations everywhere, World War Two meant technological innovation, bureaucratic expansion, and an extraordinary
mobilization of human resources and ideological fervor. Governments on all sides presented the conflict as a holy war for
national survival and glory, a mission to defend and propagate the finest values of their state and culture.” 3
• “The Axis powers declared they were creating a virile new world order that both revitalized traditional virtues and
“transcended the modern,” as some Japanese intellectuals phrased it. Allied leaders rallied their people under the banner of
combating tyranny and oppression and defending an ideal moral order, exemplified by the Atlantic Charter and Franklin
Roosevelt’s “four freedoms.” 3
• “At the same time, there occurred a “hidden Holocaust”—that is, a conveniently forgotten one—in which the annihilation of
Jews was actively supported by French and Dutch citizens, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians,
and Latvians. It is now also well documented that anti-Semitism in the United States and Great Britain prevented both
countries from doing as much as they could have to publicize these genocidal policies or mount a serious rescue campaign.”4
• “Blacks raised questions about “fighting for the white folks,” and called for “double victory” at home and abroad. Asians,
especially Chinese and Indians, decried the humiliation of being allied to a country which deemed them unfit for citizenship;
and for a full year in the midst of the war, the U.S Congress debated the issue of revising the suddenly notorious Oriental
exclusion laws. In such ways, World War Two contributed immeasurably not only to a sharpened awareness of racism
within the United States, but also to more radical demands and militant tactics on the part of the victims of discrimination.” 5
• “Japan did not invade independent countries in southern Asia. It invaded colonial outposts which the Westerners had
dominated for generations, taking absolutely for granted their racial and cultural superiority over their Asian subjects.
Japan’s belated emergence as a dominant power in Asia, culminating in the devastating “advance south” of 1941-42,
challenged not just the Western presence but the entire mystique of white supremacism on which centuries of European and
American expansion had rested.” 5-6
• “The media in the West were frequently even more apocalyptic in their expression of such fears. Thus, the Hearst
newspapers declared the war in Asia totally different from that in Europe, for Japan was a “racial menace” as well as a
cultural and religious one, and if it proved victorious in the Pacific there would be “perpetual war between Oriental ideals and
Occidental.” 7
• “An endless stream of evidence ranging from atrocities to suicidal tactics could be cited, moreover, to substantiate the belief
that the Japanese were a uniquely contemptible and formidable foe who deserved no mercy and virtually demanded
extermination.” 9
• “Their leaders and ideologues constantly affirmed their unique “purity” as a race and culture, and turned the war itself—and
eventually mass death—into an act of individual and collective purification. Americans and Europeans existed in wartime
Japanese imagination as vivid monsters, devils, and demons; and one had only to point to the bombing of Japanese cities (or
the lynching of blacks in America) to demonstrate the aptness of this metaphor.” 9
• “The war words and race words which so dominated the propaganda of Japan’s white enemies—the core imagery of apes,
lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers as well—have a pedigree in Western
thought that can be traced back to Aristotle, and were conspicuous in the earliest encounters of Europeans with the black
peoples of Africa and the Indians of the Western Hemisphere. The Japanese, so “unique” in the rhetoric of World War Two,
were actually saddled with racial stereotypes that Europeans and Americans had applied to nonwhites for centuries: during
the conquest of the New World, the slave trade, the Indian wars in the United States, the agitation against Chinese
immigrants in America, the colonization of Asia and Africa, the U.S. conquest of the Philippines at the turn of the century.
These were stereotypes, moreover, which had been strongly reinforced by nineteenth-century Western science.” 10
• “Idioms that formerly had denoted the unbridgeable gap between oneself and the enemy proved capable of serving the goals
of accommodation as well. To the victors, the simian became a pet, the child a pupil, the madman a patient. In Japan, purity
was now identified with peaceful rather than martial pursuits, and with the purge of corrupt militaristic and feudalistic
influences rather than decadent Western bourgeois values, as had been the case during the war. Victory confirmed the Allies’
assumptions of superiority, while ideology of “proper place” enabled the Japanese to adjust to being a good loser.” 13
• “The merciless struggle for control of Asia and the Pacific gave way, in a remarkably short time, to an occupation in which
mercy was indeed displayed by the conquerors, and generosity and goodwill characterized many of the actions of victor and
vanquished alike.” 13
• “As announced in official policy statements, the ultimate goal of the war effort was a world in which Asian peoples would be
free of Western domination, a harmonious international order which would allow “all nations and races to assume their
proper place in the world, and all peoples to be at peace in their own sphere.” (205) Unfortunately, the road to such a new
world became a bloody one, full of atrocities both random and official, including the 1937 Rape of Nanking; the devastating
policy of “kill all, burn all, destroy all” in rural China; the massacres of Chinese in Singapore, Dutch in Borneo, and Filipinos
in Manila; and the criminal treatment of tens of thousands of laborers in Korea, Indonesia, and Burma.” 468, Rosenstone
Sources: movies, propaganda, newspapers, cartoons, books, speeches, journals, letters
6
Connections: Takaki, Double Victory, Lilenthal, History Wars
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972)
Argument: “The central argument of this learned and judicious book is that domestic political pressures had a great deal to do with
the shaping of American foreign policy during and after World War II. “Revisionists are correct in emphasizing the importance of
internal constraints, but they had defined them too narrowly: by focusing so heavily on economics they neglect the profound impact
on the domestic political system on the conduct of American foreign policy.” (357) On the assumption that Stalin was less severely
constrained by domestic Soviet political pressures, John Lewis Gaddis concludes that the USSR should bear a larger responsibility for
the onset of the Cold War than the United States, whose political leaders were effectively hemmed in by public opinion and party
jockeying for electoral advantage.” 287, McNeill
• “The Cold War grew out of a complicated interaction of external and internal developments inside both the United States and
the Soviet Union. The external situation—circumstances beyond the control of either power—left Americans and Russians
facing one another across prostrated Europe at the end of World War II. Internal influences in the Soviet Union—the search
for security, the role of ideology, massive postwar reconstruction needs, the personality of Stalin—together with those in the
United States—the ideal of self-determination, fear of communism, the illusion of omnipotence fostered by American
economic strength and the atomic bomb—made the resulting confrontation a hostile one. Leaders of both superpowers
sought peace, but in doing so yielded to considerations which, while they did not precipitate war, made a resolution of
difference impossible.” 361
• “But surprisingly few scholars since have looked at the role party and Congressional politics played in shaping foreign policy
during World War II and the early Cold War.” X
• “I have sought to analyze the evolution of United States policy toward the Soviet Union from the formation of the Grand
Alliance in 1941 to the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947. I have proceeded on the assumption that foreign
policy is the product of external and internal influences, as perceived by officials responsible for its formulation.” Xiii
• “If there is a single theme which runs through this book, it is the narrow range of alternatives open to American leaders
during this period as they sought to deal with problems of war and peace.” Xiii
• “In contrast to much recent work on the subject, this book will not treat the “Open Door” as the basis of United States foreign
policy. Revisionist historians have performed a needed service by stressing the influence of economic considerations on
American diplomacy, but their focus has been too narrow; many other forces—domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks
of personality, perceptions, accurate or inaccurate, of Soviet intentions—also affected the actions of Washington officials. I
have tried to convey the full diversity and relative significance of these determinants of policy.” Xiii-xiv
• “By early 1946, President Truman and his advisers had reluctantly concluded that recent actions of the Soviet Union
endangered the security of the United States. That decision grew out of a complex internal and external pressures, all filtered
through the perceptions and preconceptions of the men who made American foreign policy.” 353
• “World War II had produced a revolution in United States foreign policy. Prior to that conflict, most Americans believed that
their country could best protect itself by minimizing political entanglements overseas. Events of 1939-40 persuaded leaders
of the Roosevelt Administration that they had been wrong; Pearl Harbor convinced remaining skeptics. From then on,
American policy-makers would seek security through involvement, not isolation: to prevent new wars, they believed, the
whole system of relations between nations would have to be reformed. Assuming that only their country had the power and
influence to carry out this task, United States officials set to work, even before formal entry into the war, to plan a peace
settlement which would accomplish such reformation.” 353-354
• “Determined to avoid mistakes which, in their view, had caused World War II, American planners sought to disarm defeated
enemies, give peoples of the world the right to shape their own future, revive world trade, and replace the League of Nations
with a new and more effective collective security organization.” 354
• “Kremlin leaders, too, looked to the past in planning for the future, but their very different experiences led them to
conclusions not always congruent with those of their American allies. For Stalin, the key to peace was simple: keep Russia
strong and Germany weak…He showed little interest in Washington’s plans for collective security, the reduction of tariff
barriers, and reform of the world monetary system. Self-determination in Eastern Europe, however, he would not allow: the
region was vital to Soviet security, but the people who lived there were bitterly anti-Russian. Nor could Stalin view with
equanimity Allied efforts…to limit reparations removals from Germany. These two conflicts—Eastern Europe and
Germany—became major areas of contention in the emerging Cold War.” 354
• “Moscow’s position would not have seemed so alarming to American officials, however, had it not been for the Soviet
Union’s continued commitment to an ideology dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism throughout the world. Hopes that the
United States might cooperate successfully with the USSR after the war had been based on the belief, encouraged by Stalin
himself, that the Kremlin had given up its former goal of exporting communism. Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe in
1944 and 1945, together with the apparent abandonment of popular front tactics by the world communist movement, caused
Western observers to fear that they had been misled.” 354-355
• “It seems likely that Washington policy-makers mistook Stalin’s determination to ensure Russian security through spheres of
influence for a renewed effort to spread communism outside the borders of the Soviet Union... But the Soviet leader failed to
7
make the limited nature of his objectives clear. Having just defeated one dictator thought to have unlimited ambitions,
Americans could not regard the emergence of another without the strongest feelings of apprehension and anger.” 355
• “ The United States had come out of the war with a monopoly over the world’s most powerful weapon, the atomic bomb, and
a near-monopoly over the productive facilities which could make possible quick rehabilitation of war-shattered
economies…Washington officials assumed that these instruments would leave the Russians no choice but to comply with
American peace plans. Attempts to extract concessions from Moscow in return for a loan failed, however, when the Soviet
Union turned to German reparations to meet its reconstruction needs.” 355
• “Nor can there by any question that the general principle of “getting tough with Russia” evoked overwhelming public
approval: a generation seared by the memory of Munich would not tolerate appeasement, however unpleasant the alternatives
might be.” 356
• “A fairer approach is to ask why policy-makers defined their alternatives so narrowly. Important recent work by revisionist
historians suggests that requirements of the economic system may have limited the options open to American officials in
seeking an accommodation with Russia. Leaders of the United States had become convinced, revisionists assert, that survival
of the capitalist system at home required the unlimited expansion of American economic influence overseas. For this reason,
the United States could not recognize legitimate Soviet interest in Eastern Europe, Germany, or elsewhere. By calling for an
international “open door” policy, Washington had projected its interests on a worldwide scale. The real or imagined threat of
communism anywhere endangered these interests, and had to be contained.” 357
• “The delay in opening the second front, nonrecognition of Moscow’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the denial of
economic aid to Russia, and the decision to retain control of the atomic bomb can all be explained far more plausibly by
citing the Administration’s need to maintain popular support for its policies rather than by dwelling upon requirements of the
economic order.” 358
• “[Revisionists] assert that the United States, because of its military and economic superiority over the Soviet Union, could
have accepted Moscow’s prewar demands without endangering American security. Because it did not, they hold leaders of
the United States responsible for the way in which the Cold War developed, if not the Cold War itself.” 358
Sources: US government documents, newspapers, periodicals, journals
Connections: LeFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, Gaddis, The Cold War, Hixson, Parting, Brinkley, End
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990)
Argument: “Cohen’s central argument is clear: that rank-and-file workers “made” the New Deal, based on the ways working-class
culture had changed during the 1920s and early 1930s; that they were motivated ideologically as well as practically, seeking to
instituted a “moral capitalism”; and that this “moral capitalism” rested on two new institutions, an interventionist state and the
industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).” 1307, Rachleff
• “The Great Depression furthered the deterioration of many ethnic institutions and their replacement by New Deal agencies
and programs. But this very development was pushed forward, Cohen argues, by workers who saw themselves as part of a
larger entity than their ethnic group, largely because of their participation in this new mass culture. Cohen also argues that,
far from leading workers to see themselves as part of an amorphous middle class, this new mass culture actually enhanced a
class consciousness among American workers.” 1307, Rachleff
• “Factory workers at these Chicago plants had tried before the 1930s to organize themselves in unions, but despite occasional
short-term success, they had never managed to sustain broad-based unionization over a significant period of time. Workers’
most recent, and successful, efforts had followed World War I. In Chicago’s steel mills, packing plants, and agricultural
equipment factories, manufacturing workers came close to building viable industrial unions, but they did not last.
Fragmentation of workers along geographic, skill, ethnic, and racial lines—along with repression by employers and
government and weak national union structures within the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL)—led to the
defeat of workers’ once promising challenge.” 3
• “While for the last quarter of the nineteenth century the native-born and northern European steelworkers who dominated in
skilled jobs managed to impose their own standards of wages, hours, and work rules through their craft union, the
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, mechanization made their skills increasingly obsolete by the early
twentieth century. Steel companies then had little trouble destroying the union and hiring nonunion, unskilled, and eastern
and southern Europeans to do more of the work.” 3
• “Craft unions of skilled butchers in Chicago’s packing plants proved more successful in incorporating the unskilled, new
immigrants who were finding increasing opportunities for work in packing as in steel, but even their best efforts to challenge
the autocracy of employers in the period from 1900 to 1904 ultimately failed.” 3-4
• “For several months skilled and unskilled workers together carried out an effective strike. Then a bomb explosion at a mass
meeting involving McCormick workers at Haymarket Square killed seven policemen and unleashed an enormous wave of
employer repression and employee fear. As a result, unionization was effectively destroyed at McCormick by the end of
1886.” 4
• “Just as Chicago’s factory workers did not have labor unions to voice their complaints and defend their rights until the
thirties, so too most of them expected little government, particularly the federal government.” 5
• “This book is devoted to explaining how it was possible and what it meant for industrial workers to become effective as
national political participants in the mid-1930s, after having sustained defeats in 1919 and having refrained from unionism
and national politics during the 1920s.” 5
8
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“But I will argue in this book that these external influences by no means tell the whole story, that their effectiveness in
thwarting or encouraging workers’ efforts depended as much on working people’s own inclinations as on the strengths of
their opponents or allies. This book will contend that what matters most in explaining why workers acted politically in ways
they did during the mid-thirties is the change in workers’ own orientation during the 1920s and 1930s. Working-class
Americans underwent a gradual shift in attitudes and behavior over the intervening decade and a half as a result of a wide
range of social and cultural experiences. Daily life both inside and outside the workplace and factors as diverse as where
workers turned for help in good times and bad, how they reacted to their employers’ “welfare capitalist” schemes, and
whether they were enticed by the new chain stores, motion picture palaces, and network radio shows or preferred the comfort
of more familiar ethnic associations all are important in analyzing how workers’ politics evolved.” 5-6
“Chapters on the 1920s explore the fate of workers’ ethnic identity after massive immigration stopped with World War I and
the restrictive legislation that followed it, the way workers encountered the explosion of mass consumption and mass culture,
and how large employers’ ideological commitment to “welfare capitalism” was experienced by those at whom it was aimed.
Similarly, for the 1930s, investigation into what the Great Depression meant to its working-class victims, how workers
viewed the New Deal, and why they came to identify with the CIO gives a new perspective to phenomena that frequently are
analyzed more in terms of institutional policy than popular experience.” 6
“This book tells the story of how industrial workers in one American city made sense of an era in our recent history when the
nation moved from a commitment to welfare capitalism to a welfare state, from a determination to resist the organization of
its industrial work force to tolerating it, and from diverse social worlds circumscribed by race, ethnicity, class, and geography
to more homogenous cultural experiences brought about by the triumph of mass culture, mass consumption, mass
unionization, and mass politics.” 8
“Whereas once many had not voted, particularly in national elections, and often had harbored fears of the government
infringing on their freedom, by the late 1930s most were loyal Democrats invested in an interventionist national government.
Similarly, whereas previously, most recently in the 1919 era, factory workers’ efforts to organize industrial unions had rarely
survived for long, workers at last succeeded in organizing unions under the umbrella of the national CIO. Whereas earlier,
working-class families had depended for their welfare needs on the informal networks and formal organizations of their
ethnic communities and less reliably on their welfare capitalist employers, they now looked to the government and unions for
protection against threats as diverse as job layoffs, illness, and unstable banking institutions. Whereas once distinctive ethnic
communities had circumscribed the cultural life of their members, workers’ exposure to mass culture, the Democratic Party,
and the CIO gave them more cultural experiences in common. National affiliations ranging from network radio fan to
Democrat to CIO unionist had replaced workers’ local, more parochial dependencies on neighborhood, ethnic group, and
employer.” 362
“Ethnic organizations proved to be crucial conduits providing new members and resources to the CIO. And as ethnic benefit
societies declined with the Great Depression, individuals within ethnic neighborhoods frequently funneled their communities’
insurance dollars into commercial companies by becoming insurance agents. In these ways, ethnic elites managed to regain
some of the credibility they had lost when working-class members of their ethnic communities felt abandoned by them in the
crisis of depression.” 362
“Nonetheless, ethnic identity continued to have meaning in the daily lives of Chicago workers during the 1930s, even though
ethnic institutions no longer satisfied members’ needs on their own. At best they served as liaisons to mainstream
alternatives, helping to ease ethnic Chicagoans into a world of nonethnic unions and government and commercially provided
services, where ethnicity became more a sensibility than a support system.” 363
“As blacks overcame their long-standing distrust of Democrats and labor unions in the 1930s and joined with white workers
in supporting the New Deal and the CIO, they were in some ways abandoning less of an alternative culture than ethnics but in
other ways risking more. By casting their fate so much with other workers, they gave up protectors like Republican Party
leaders and employers and grew dependent on the egalitarian commitment of government, union, and fellow workers. The
decades that followed the thirties, filled as they were with continued discrimination, would only demonstrate how limited
these commitments were.” 363
“During the 1920s, the legendary transformative forces of Americanization, consumerism, mass culture, and welfare
capitalism had not integrated Chicago’s workers into the homogeneous and compliant “middle-class mass” that many had
hoped for, where workers were indistinguishable from Chicagoans of other classes and ethnicities. Rather, during the
twenties ethnic communities proved remarkably adaptable in their confrontation with such homogenizing forces. They
strengthened their ethnoreligious institutions in the face of the Americanizing intentions of the Chicago Catholic
Archdiocese. They adapted their fraternal organizations to compete with the alternative insurance scheme of commercial
companies and employer and in a way that broadened workers’ ethnic identity beyond narrow geographic or cultural
boundaries.” 364
“For much of the 1920s, moreover, most working-class Chicagoans continued to shop at their neighborhood, ethnic-owned
“Mom and Pop” stores, not at the new national chains; to listen to radio programs produced locally, often by members of
their own ethnic and religious communities; and to watch motion pictures at their neighborhood theaters rather than in the
great movie palaces of the era. Finally, even as Chicago workers came to embrace the basic premise of their employers’
welfare capitalism, that capitalism could be fair to workers if employers lived up to their lost sight of the continuing
antagonism between capital and labor. Workers’ efforts to influence the way welfare capitalism functioned in the factory,
furthermore, strengthened alliances among workers of different ethnicities and races. Workers found themselves by the end
9
of the 1920s cooperating increasingly across ethnic, racial, and skill lines on the job while still depending upon the
institutions of their ethnic communities outside of it.” 364
• “The Great Depression upset the survival strategies workers had developed during the 1920s and forced new solutions. As it
weakened the welfare and financial institutions of workers’ ethnic and racial communities and drove employers to eliminate
most of their welfare capitalist programs, workers had to look beyond their ethnic networks and bosses for help. In the late
1920s hatred of Prohibition had finally galvanized ethnic workers to unify as Democrats and had helped them recognize the
usefulness of state action in alleviating the oppression. When local and private welfare efforts failed to meet the depression
crisis, turning to the national government seemed the best way of redressing this wrong as well as offered an assistance to
workers that they felt they had rightfully earned through their increased participation as Democratic voters.” 364
• “To complement the welfare in protecting their interests, moreover, workers enlisted in the battle to create strong industrial
unions. Beginning in the mid-1930s they laid the groundwork, with the help of the New Deal and national CIO leaders, for
the organization of most of America’s mass production plants by the end of World War II.” 364
• “More of them were second-generation American, they had come to trust each other in mounting collective responses to
employers’ welfare capitalist schemes in the twenties and early depression, and the particular way that mass culture reached
workers during the 1920s and 1930s did not absorb them into a classless cultural mainstream. By the thirties, consolidation
in the dissemination of mass culture through fewer and stronger chain stores, chain radio networks, and chain theaters
combined with hardships the depression brought to their smaller competitors meant that workers came to inhabit a more
similar cultural world regardless of their race or ethnicity…the CIO recognized how much the success of its efforts to
unionize the nation’s mass production factories depended on workers’ new common ground, and it developed an
organizational strategy that built on this new potential for unity.” 365
• “The Democratic Party came out of the war committed to using the powers of government to ensure economic growth and no
longer as concerned about balancing the goal with efforts to tame capitalism’s excesses. For labor, this meant that during the
biggest strike wave ever, in 1945-6, the Truman administration intervened on the side of employers, and the next year
congressional Democrats cooperated in the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which deprived workers of many of the benefits
they had gained under the NLRA. Government in industrial relations in the 1930s had protected workers’ rights now
presided over their restriction. It became harder for workers and their unions to strike, to establish the closed shop, to
influence employers’ hiring and firing, to take sides in the ranks.” 366-367
• “The racial conflicts, the ideological divisions, and the centralization of authority would come to characterize CIO unions
later have led many postwar labor analysts to minimize the achievements of ordinary workers in the 1930s. By keeping its
focus on the interwar years, this book has tried to recapture what rank-and-file workers accomplished in building a successful
CIO movement, without romanticizing who they were or denying the imperfections in what they achieved.” 368
Sources: Labor papers, ethnic papers, radio broadcasts, ethnic surveys, newspapers, government records
Connections: Rosenzweig, Eight, Grossman, Land of Hope, Lehman, Promised, Hawley, The Great War, Kennedy, Over,
Leuchtenburg, Perils, Brinkley, End, Leuchtenburg, FDR
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (1991)
Argument: “In summary the crux of American history from the 1890s to the 1930s was the imbalance between a bustling society and
the existing liberal state. The dynamics of social change and overseas expansion created contradictions that could not be contained
within the political framework handed down from the nineteenth century. As a result of struggles between industrialist and worker,
Victorian moralist and New Women, nativist and immigrant, the old governing system had to change.” 4-5
• “The crux of American history in the early twentieth century, then, lay in the reckoning between a dynamic society and the
existing liberal state. The story of that reckoning unfolded in three stages”: 1. The imbalance of state and society, 1890s1913, 2. Confronting Issues, 1914-1924, and 3. Resolving the imbalance, 1925-1938. 1-4
• “In the first period [the imbalance of state and society, 1890s-1913]…American society was on a collision course with its
own political system. The dominant feature of the nineteenth-century political landscape was liberalism…liberalism had
long emphasized constitutional checks and balances as against the arbitrary power of centralized authority…by the time the
Carnegies and the Rockefellers came along, the emphasis was on opposition to government intervention in the marketplace.
Insofar as this laissez-faire liberalism was taken as a license for the accumulation of unlimited wealth, it underwrote the
growing gap between urban workers and captains of industry.” 2
• “In every case, reform struggles ran up against one aspect or another of the liberal state. Although giant corporations no
longer played by the rules of family capitalism, laws devised in an earlier era made hard to bring big businesses to heel.
Despite the increasing influence of women in public life, male suffrage lay across the path of women’s emancipation. Even
though poverty on a mass scale made a mockery of the Protestant ethic of individual self-reliance, laissez faire prevented the
community from addressing the needs of the urban multitude. In the face of new demands for civil rights, segregation held
fast.” 2
• “The more the United States assumed an imperial posture, the more it denied its own cherished principle of selfgovernment.” 3
• “But all that was as nothing compared with the level of state intervention after the declaration of war in 1917. “War is the
health of the state,” warned one critic; and as if to confirm the warning, the Wilson administration mobilized, propagandized,
regulated, repressed, and taxed the population as no government had every done before.” 3
10
“A governing system is defined to include, first, the state apparatus proper—army, police, courts, legislatures, electoral
systems, and constitutional structures such as federalism and separation of powers. Second, it includes the means of access to
state power, such as parties, elections. Lobbying, and bribery. Third, it encompasses ruling ideas, patterns of authority in
family, workplace, and community, and prevailing morality. In short, a governing system is the state embedded in society.
Because state and society were linked in a dialectical relationship, it was impossible for one to change without affecting the
other.” 4
• “3. Resolving the imbalance, 1925-1938. The imbalance was finally resolved in the 1930s when the Great Depression
triggered the same kind of national emergency as the Great War and called forth the same level of state intervention…Putting
a bridle in the mouth of untamed capitalist empire-builders, Roosevelt’s New Deal instituted a fledgling welfare state and
imposed new regulations on industrial relations with the aim of restraining individual liberty for the good of society. If at the
end of the decade America was still governed by a liberal state—and that is subject to interpretation—then it was liberalism
with a social face.” 4
• “The overriding purpose of reform was captured in the name of one of the New Deal’s major accomplishments: Social
Security…the new social liberalism…differed from constitutional checks and balances in terms of its centralization of power
and creation of new bureaucracies that became the “fourth branch” of government. It also differed from the liberalism of
laissez faire in terms of its extensive regulation of the market.” 4
• “Driven by the necessity of circumstance, the United States shifted from the individual toward the social, from personal
liberty toward social security, from less government toward more government. In short, Americans were dragged kicking
and screaming toward social responsibility. The task of this book is to show why that shift took place.” 5
• “Two kinds of comparisons are made in the following pages. First, within the United States, North and South are measured
against each other as a means of exploring regional differences in industrial relations, race and gender, and ideas of liberty.
Second, within the international framework, the United States is compared with Germany. With respect to the evolution of
corporate capitalism and bureaucratic controls over social reproduction, the United States and Germany were closer to each
other than to Britain or France.” 10
• “In one aspect, the dynamics arose out of internal contradictions among opposing social forces, and, in another, out of
imbalance between the changing life of the society and the existing form of the state.” 410
• “With the social weight of industrial workers mounting to its all-time peak, it is not surprising that industrial conflict
climaxed in 1919-1920 with the largest strike wave in all of American history. It is not too much to say that the tension
between corporate elite and laboring mass was the main dynamic of social change in this period.” 410
• “Breaking free from her gilded cage, the New Woman claimed sexual equality as a human right against the more
conventional assertion of women’s special virtue and peculiar needs. As the middle-class family collapsed toward its nuclear
core and as women increasingly entered the job market and public life, the old doctrine of separate spheres increasingly
became an anachronism.” 410-411
• “The fact that corporate elites were largely college-educated Yankee Protestants whereas the mass of urban wage earners
were culturally diverse and poorly educated meant that the relative strength of the various groups hung in the balance around
the outcome of political battles such as those over immigration restriction and Prohibition.” 411
• “If the leading public issues of the day arose from the cockpits of social conflict, then the place to look for an explanation for
the rise of the new liberalism is in the impact of contending social forces upon the governing system.” 411
• “The old governing system—that is, legislatures and courts devoted to laissez faire, buttressed by Victorian forms of gender,
and imbued with Social Darwinist myths of race—lost its capacity to govern.” 411
• “The first inkling that a great transformation was in store came in the Progressive Era when social reformers first laid siege to
laissez faire.” 411
• “U.S. entrance onto the world stage laid heavy strains on the existing governing system. Even more than the acquisition of
an overseas empire, the exigencies of the First World War proved that the old state structures were simply not up to the task
of mobilizing, regulating, and propagandizing the civilian population.” 412
• “Roosevelt began by following in his predecessor’s managerial footsteps, only when government-assisted corporate planning
failed to end the Depression did he embark on new experiments of his own. Wedded to no particular philosophy, he
supported the Wagner Act and Social Security, which, along with numerous other innovations, curbed private property and
gave birth to a welfare state.” 413
• “Whereas crusading liberals at the time of the Red Scare had seen socialism as their mortal enemy, the new liberals of the
“Red Decade” were willing to use watered-down socialist ideas against the would-be tyranny of archconservative
industrialists. It may have been the case that the best in liberal values could no longer be realized within a capitalist society;
even so, a more human capitalism was better than a less humane one.” 414
• “the New Deal simply ducked the issue of equality between the sexes. Indeed, in excluding many of the poorest wage
earners—often female—from state protection and in seeking to shore up the consumer family it displaced many of the
burdens of inequality onto women. With respect to race relations, the New Deal never confronted “the American dilemma”
head on. As a consequence, the unanswered question of sex and race were left to become the burning issues of the 1960s.”
• “For that matter, the New Deal’s reform of liberty was never intended to usher in the reign of equality. Roosevelt was
determined at all times to save the capitalist system, even if that meant saving it from the capitalists themselves.” 414
Sources: synthesis
•
11
Connections: Leuchtenburg, Perlis, Cohen, Making, Grossman, Land of Hope, Lehman, Promised, Hawley, Making, Kennedy,
Over, Brinkley, End, Leuchtenburg, FDR
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995)
Argument: “The new liberalism that evolved in response to this changing world wrapped itself in the mantle of the New Deal, but
bore only a partial resemblance to the ideas that had shaped the original New Deal. It was more coherent, less diverse, and on the
whole less challenging to the existing structure of corporate capitalism than some of the ideas it supplanted. For at least twenty years
after the end of World War II, it dominated liberal thought and liberal action. To some extent, battered and reviled as it has become, it
remains near the center of American political life still. How and why it emerged is the subject of this book.” 4
• “Like the progressives before them, few New Dealers were genuinely hostile to capitalism. But they were not uncritical
defenders. The belief that something was wrong with capitalism and that government should find a way to repair it was,
therefore, a central element of liberal thought throughout much of the 1930s.” 5
• “Beginning early in the twentieth century, a competing form of liberalism emerged: a “reform” liberalism, skeptical of
laissez-faire claims that an unrestricted social and economic marketplace would produce a just and open society. Reform
liberals (most of whom at first called themselves progressives) embraced so many different goals that historians have at times
despaired of establishing any definition at all of the concept of “progressivism” or “reform”…the ways in which progressives
distinguished themselves from laissez-faire liberals was their belief in the interconnectedness of society, and thus in the need
to protect individuals, communities, and the government itself from excessive corporate power, the need to ensure the
citizenry a basic level of subsistence and dignity, usually through some form of state intervention.” 9
• “New Dealers had little interest in the moral aspects of progressive reform; they generally avoided issues of race, ethnicity,
family, gender, and personal behavior—in part because they feared the cultural and political battles such issues had produced
in the 1920s, battles that had done great damage to the Democratic party and ones many liberals had come to interpret as a
form of popular irrationality.” 9
• “In the aftermath of the New Deal, and partly as a result of it, a third form of liberalism emerged—one that has now
dominated much of American political life for several generations. This new liberalism has focused less on the broad needs
of the nation and the modern economy than on increasing the rights and freedoms of individuals and social groups. It has
sought to extend civil rights to minorities, women, and others previously excluded from the mainstream of American life. It
has also attempted to expand the notion of personal liberty and individual freedom for everyone.” 10
• “Liberalism after 1945 achieved much in the area of rights, but in the end it had taken a wrong turn. Administering a welfare
state that failed to solve the poor’s problems and increasingly engaged in “divisive cultural battles” (270), liberals retreated
from the unfinished assignment to reform capitalist institutions in the public interest. Liberalism gradually lost its way as a
guide to America’s trouble in a globalizing economy.” 210-211, Graham
• “by the end of 1937 the active phase of the New Deal had largely come to an end…On the whole, however, the Roosevelt
administration in those years no longer had the political capital—and at times, it seemed, no longer the political will—to
sustain a program of reform in any way comparable to its earlier efforts. The result was a political stalemate that continued
into an beyond World War II.” 3
• “The new liberalism…emerged, rather, from innumerable small adaptations that gradually but decisively accumulated. It
emerged because by the late 1930s it had become evident that the concrete achievements of the New Deal had ceased to bear
any clear relation to the ideological rationales that had supported their creation, and thus that liberals needed new rationales
to explain and justify them. It emerged because the recession of 1937, the changing climate of the late 1930s, and the
emergence of World War II substantially altered the environment in which liberals thought and acted.” 4
• “”Above all, it developed because, as in all eras, political ideas were constantly interacting with, and adapting to larger
changes in the social, economic, and cultural landscape.” 4
• “Most of all, perhaps, it was a world in which both the idea and the reality of mass consumption were becoming central to
American culture and to the American economy, gradually supplanting production as the principal focus of popular hopes
and commitment. In an economy driven by consumer spending, and in a culture increasingly dominated by dreams of
consumption, it is not surprising that political thought began to reflect consumer-oriented assumptions as well.” 4
• “A decade later, in 1945, the ideology of American liberalism looked strikingly different. The critique of modern capitalism
that had been so important in the early 1930s (and, indeed, for several decades before that) was largely gone, or at least so
attenuated as to be of little more than rhetorical significance. In its place was a set of liberal ideas essentially reconciled to
the existing structure of the economy and committed to using the state to compensate for capitalism’s inevitable flaws—a
philosophy that signaled, implicitly at least, a resolution of some of the most divisive political controversies of the industrial
era.” 6
• “When liberals spoke now of government’s responsibility to protect the health of the industrial world, they defined that
responsibility less as a commitment to restructure the economy than as an effort to stabilize it and help it grow. They were no
longer much concerned about controlling or punishing “plutocrats” and “economic royalists,” an impulse central to New Deal
rhetoric in the mid-1930s. Instead, they spoke of their commitment to providing a healthy environment in which the
corporate world could flourish and in which the economy could sustain “full employment.” 7
• “Fiscal policy—the getting and spending of money by the federal government—had become the focus of liberal hopes for the
economy; “planning” now meant an Olympian manipulation of macroeconomic levers, not direct intervention in the day-today affairs of the corporate world.” 7
12
“All liberals claim to believe in personal liberty, human progress, and the pursuit of rational self-interest by individuals as
the basis of a free society. But there is considerable, often intense, disagreement among them over what those ideas mean.” 8
• “At the beginning of the century, and for many decades previously, “liberalism” generally referred to a belief in economic
freedom and strictly limited government [it meant laissez-faire liberalism]” 8
• “Laissez-faire liberalism envisioned a fluid, changing society in which the state would not protect existing patterns of wealth
and privilege, in which individuals could pursue their goals freely and advance in accordance with their own merits and
achievements.” 9
• “signs of the change abounded. It was visible, for example, in the character of the postwar liberal community. Most of the
“planners,” “regulators,” and “anti-monopolists” who had dominated liberal circles eight years earlier were no longer central
figures in the discussion of public policy.” 267
• “many liberals were preoccupied with international questions and with the emerging schism within their ranks over the
Soviet Union, and were paying less attention to domestic issues than they once had. But those who did attempt to define a
domestic agenda were largely people fired with enthusiasm for the vision of a full-employment economy, people who
considered the New Deal’s principal legacy the idea of effective use of fiscal policy and the expansion of social welfare and
insurance programs.” 267
• “The Democratic party platform in 1944 was another sign of the changing political landscape. Four years earlier, the party
platform had called for measures against the “unbridled concentration of economic power and the exploitation of the
consumer and the investor.” It had boasted of the New Deal’s regulatory innovations, its aggressive antitrust policies, its war
on “the extortionate methods of monopoly.” The 1944 platform also praised the administration’s anti-monopoly and
regulatory efforts—in a perfunctory sentence near the end. But most of its limited discussion of domestic issues centered on
how the New Deal had “found the road to prosperity” through aggressive compensatory measures: fiscal policies and social
welfare innovations.” 268
• “The liberal vision of political economy in the 1940s rested…on the belief that protecting consumers and encouraging mass
consumption, more than protecting producers and promoting savings, were the principal responsibilities of the liberal state.
In its pursuit of full employment, the government would not seek to regulate corporate institutions so much as it would try to
influence the business cycle. It would not try to redistribute economic power and limit inequality so much as it would create
a compensatory welfare system (what later generations would call a “safety net”) for those whom capitalism had failed. It
would not reshape capitalist institutions. It would reshape the economic and social environment in which those institutions
worked.” 268
• “The importance of the New Deal lies in large part, of course, in its actual legislative and institutional achievements: the
Social Security System, the Wagner Act, the TVA, the farm subsidy programs, the regulation of wages and hours, the
construction of vast systems of public works, the new regulatory mechanisms for important areas of the economy, and
others—achievements that together transformed the federal government and its relationship to the economy and to the
American people. But the New Deal’s significance lies as well in its impact on subsequent generations of liberals, and,
through them, on two decades of postwar government activism.” 268
• “They had, in effect, detached liberalism from its earlier emphasis on reform—its preoccupation with issues of class its
tendency to equate freedom and democracy with economic autonomy, its hostility to concentrated economic power. They
had redefined citizenship to de-emphasize the role of men and women as producers and to elevate their roles as consumers.”
Sources: government documents, speeches, democratic records, newspapers, intellectual thinkers
Connections: Leuchtenburg, FDR and Perils, Dawley, Struggles, Cohen, Making, Kennedy, Over, Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War,
Hawley, The Great
•
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963)
Argument: FDR re-created the Presidency and his New Deal programs helped save America through economic reform and by
recognizing other, non-elite groups.
• “Franklin Roosevelt re-created the modern Presidency. He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in
the previous twelve years and gave it an importance which went beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson had done…Under Roosevelt, the White House became the focus of all government—the fountainhead of ideas, the
initiator of action, the representative of the national interest.” 327
• “Roosevelt’s most important formal contribution was his creation of the Executive Office of the President on September 8,
1939. Executive Order 8248, a “nearly unnoticed but none the less epoch-making event in the history of American
institutions,” set up an Executive Office staffed with six administrative assistants with a “passion for anonymity.” 327
• “At his very first press conference, Roosevelt abolished the written question and told reporters they could interrogate him
without warning…To a degree, Roosevelt’s press conferences introduced, as some observers claimed, a new institution like
Britain’s parliamentary questioning; more to the point, it was a device the President manipulated, disarmingly and adroitly, to
win support for his program. It served too as a classroom to instruct the country in the new economic and the new politics.”
• “Roosevelt was the first president to master the technique of reaching people directly over the radio.” 330
• “There was a real dialogue between Roosevelt and the people,” [Eleanor Roosevelt] reflected. “That dialogue seems to have
disappeared from the government since he died.” 331
• “For the first time for many Americans, the federal government became an institution that was directly experienced. More
than state and local governments, it came to be the government, an agency directly concerned with their welfare.” 331
13
“Franklin Roosevelt personified the state as protector.” 331
“When Roosevelt took office, the country, to a very large degree, responded to the will of a single element: the white, AngloSaxon, Protestant property-holding class. Under the New Deal, new groups took their place in the sun.” 332
• “Franklin Roosevelt had quietly brought the Negro into the New Deal coalition.” 332
• “The devotion Roosevelt aroused owed much to the fact that the New Deal assumed the responsibility for guaranteeing every
American a minimum standard of subsistence.” 332
• “The Roosevelt administration gave such assistance not as a matter of charity but of right. This system of social rights was
written into the Social Security Act. Other New Deal legislation abolished child labor in interstate commerce and, by putting
a floor under wages and a ceiling on hours, all but wiped out the sweatshop. Roosevelt and his aides fashioned a government
which consciously sought to make the industrial system more humane and to protect workers and their families from
exploitation.” 332-333
• “Nearly everyone in the Roosevelt government was caught up to some degree by a sense of participation in something larger
than themselves.” 333
• “The federal government expanded enormously in the Roosevelt years. The crisis of the depression dissipated the distrust of
the state inherited from the eighteenth century and reinforced in diverse ways by the Jeffersonians and the Spencerians.” 333
• “The New Dealers were convinced that the depression was the result not simply of an economic breakdown but of a political
collapse; hence, they sought new political instrumentalities. The reformers of the 1930’s accepted almost unquestioningly
the use of coercion by the state to achieve reforms…This elephantine growth of the federal government owed much to the
fact that local and state governments had been tried in the crisis and found wanting.” 333
• “Under the New Deal, the federal government greatly extended its power over the economy. By the end of the Roosevelt
years, few questioned the right of the government to pay the farmer millions in subsidies not to grow crops, to enter plants to
conduct union elections, to regulate business enterprises from utility companies to air lines, or even to compete directly with
business by generating and distributing hydroelectric power.” 335
• “In the Roosevelt era, the conviction that government both should and could act to forestall future breakdowns gained general
acceptance. The New Deal left a legacy of antidepression controls—securities regulation, banking reforms, unemployment
compensation—even if it could not guarantee that a subsequent administration would use them.” 335
• “Reform in the 1930’s meant economic reform; it departed from the Methodist-parsonage morality of many of the earlier
Progressives, in part because much of the New Deal support, and many of its leaders, derived from urban immigrant groups
hostile to the old Sabbatarianism. While the progressive grieved over the fate of the prostitute, the New Dealer would have
placed Mrs. Warren’s profession under a code of authority.” 339
• “Many of the early New Dealers…did…hope to achieve reform through regeneration: the regeneration of the businessman.
By the end of 1935, attempting to evangelize the Right, they mobilized massive political power against the power of the
corporation. They relied not on converting industrial sinners but in using sufficient coercion.” 339
• “The New Dealers denied that depressions were inevitable events that had to be born stoically, most of the stoicism to be
displayed by the most impoverished, and they were willing to explore novel ways to make the social order more stable and
more humane.” 344
• “The New Deal left many problems unsolved and even created some perplexing new ones. It never demonstrated that it
could achieve prosperity in peacetime. As late as 1941, the unemployed still numbered six million, and not until the war year
of 1943 did the army of the jobless finally disappear. It enhanced the power of interest groups who claimed to speak for
millions, but sometimes represented only a small minority. It did not evolve a way to protect people who had no such
spokesmen, nor an acceptable method for disciplining the interest groups. In 1946, President Truman would resort to a threat
to draft railway workers into the Army to avert a strike. The New Deal achieved a more just society by recognizing groups
which had been largely unrepresented—staple farmers, industrial workers, particular ethnic groups, and the new intellectualadministrative class. Yet this was still a halfway revolution; it swelled the ranks of the bourgeoisie but left many
Americans—sharecroppers, slum dwellers, most Negroes—outside of the new equilibrium.” 347
Sources: synthesis
Connections: Brinkley, End, Dawley, Struggles, Cohen, Making, Leuchtenburg, Perils, Kennedy, Over, Halwey, The Great, Gaddis,
Origins of the Cold War, Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, Schulman, From Cotton and Seventies
•
•
Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (2001)
Argument: “The Seventies transformed American economic and cultural life as much as, if not more than the revolutions in manners
and morals of the 1920s and the 1960s. The decade reshaped the political landscape more dramatically than the 1930s. In race
relations, religion, family life, politics, and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern U.S. history,
the beginning of our time.” Xii
• “If one date delineated the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies, it was the year 1968. It struck many
observers, then and now, as a revolutionary moment. Nineteen sixty-eight marked simultaneously an annus mirabilis and an
annus horribilus, a year of miracles and a year of horrors.” 1
• “Then during the Seventies, the tides of American life turned. A booming economy and burgeoning population transformed
the South and Southwest. Renamed the Sunbelt, this outcast region wrested control of national politics, sending the winning
candidate to the White House in every election after 1964.” Xviii-xiv
14
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“The Sunbelt South’s issues and outlook, Nixon recognized, would soon define the contours of an emerging new majority
in American politics.” Xiv
“This southernization of American life also translated into new-found respect for religion—a broad, nationwide interest in the
experience of spiritual rebirth.” Xiv
“A new ethic of personal liberation trumped older notions of decency, civility, and restraint. Americans widely embraced
this loosed code of conduct. Even those who had never been hippies, or never even liked hippies, displayed a willingness to
let it all hang loose.” Xv
“the United States would not prove immune to violent confrontation. An explosion of racial outrage after the assassination of
Martin Luther King Jr., brought smashed windows and tense confrontations between police and protesters within blocks of
the White House…After King’s death, his vision of racial harmony—even the modest hope of the races living side by side in
peace—evaporated. 1968 marked the fourth consecutive year of massive racial violence in America’s cities. The end was no
where in sight, and indeed a race war on the nation’s streets seemed a real possibility.” 2
“If those assassinations [King and RFK] did not extinguish the extravagant hopes of the era, one small, historically
insignificant event in the fall of 1968 signaled the end of the optimistic, liberal 1960s. On October 20, thirty-nine-year-old
Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of the martyred president, married a sixty-two-year-old Greek shipping magnate, Aristotle
Socrates Onasis. The mystery of this event—why would she? how could she?—shocked the nation for weeks…For most, it
was no laughing matter but the tawdry end of Camelot. The shining knight had died, and now the swarthy villain carried off
his noble lady. The dream that was the 1960s, it seemed, had died. The stormy, uncertain Seventies had begun.” 4
“The continuous expansion of the federal establishment, even under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, pointed to
a key element of the postwar era: the liberal consensus that made big government possible…Most Americans accepted the
activist state, with its commitments to the protection of individual rights, the promotion of economic prosperity, and the
establishment of some rudimentary form of political equality and social justice for all Americans.” 5
“The liberal coalition in turn relined on northern regional ascendancy…The old manufacturing centers, what would be called
the Rustbelt, still dominated American economic life, supplying the nation’s most prominent business leaders and labor
chieftains.” 5
“Tet turned out to be a decisive engagement—not on the battlefields of Vietnam as General Westmoreland hoped, but in the
living rooms of America. The offensive made clear that there was plenty of fight left in the enemy, that it could attack at
will; even the U.S headquarters in Saigon were at risk. Support for the war drained away instantly; Tet vividly demonstrated
that U.S strategy had failed.” 7
“Disturbing as that was, the loss of global economic hegemony and the bursting of the postwar boom might have been even
harder to accept. Since World War II, the dollar had been the world’s currency, the global economic stabilizer. But by 1970,
the all-powerful greenback faced sustained attack as foreign investors dumped dollars, driving down its value and forcing the
United States to take extraordinary steps to preserve the international monetary system. In 1968, the Federal Reserve Board
raised interest rates to 5 ½ percent, their highest level since 1929 , the eve of the Great Depression.” 7
“The shocking financial news hinted at the approaching end of that greatest of great rides, the long postwar boom. That
phenomenal economic growth—the nation’s vaulting advances in productivity, output, and wages—had allowed Americans
to accomplish unprecedented achievements. The United States had fought the cold war and rebuilt Europe and Japan. It
incorporated millions of working Americans into a home-owning, college-educated middle class. And it still had enough left
over to lift millions of American out of desperate poverty and to establish a social safety net for all citizens.” 7
“The Seventies would grapple with the problems of stagflation—the crippling coupling of high rates of inflation and
economic stagnation, the seemingly impossible combination of rising prices with high unemployment, slow growth, and
declining increases in productivity.” 8
“the Yippies planned not a protest but a Festival of Life—music, nakedness, drugs. They would not so much protest the war
in Vietnam as dramatize a more fundamental internal conflict: the confrontation of a liberated, authentic culture with the
phony, straitlaced, inhibited, greedy one that had brought on the war.” 12
“The F-U-C-K chant, with is deliberate attempt to shock sensibility by rejecting established, repressive standards of
propriety, asked why Americans could find such language profane, but not the war in Vietnam. It suggested an alternative,
more liberated, and supposedly more honest and authentic way of being. The obscene chant was as much a political protest
as the antiwar song that followed; political protest and countercultural sensibilities went hand in hand.” 15
“Certainly 1984 marked a turning point, the end of the long 1970s. The economy had recovered, taming the ruinous inflation
that had cast such a pall over American life. Malaise and Jimmy Carter had vanished; they became subjects of mockery,
symbols of the bad old days forgotten in the boosterism and patriotic exuberance of Reagan’s America.” 254
“By 1984, disco and punk had disappeared, director’s cinema had retreated into a small, insignificant corner of the film
industry, and the most ambitious experiments in communal life and spiritual renewal had disbanded or become conventional.
Rap, with its militarist lyrics and contempt for racial integration, competed with country, the most conspicuous component of
a southernized national culture, for control of the airwaves.” 254
“Similarly, he argues that other ethnic minorities—including Latinos, Japanese Americans, and American Indians—came to
emphasize the preservation of distinctive racial and cultural ideals instead of fighting for integration into the mainstream.”
336, Jay
“the meaning of disco, which he claims “held out the allure of integration” to disenfranchised groups, especially African
Americans, Latinos, gay men, and urban youth and allowed for easy crossover to white audiences wager to shake their
15
booties (and to white artists ready to capitalize on the genre’s success)…For Schulman, the intense hatred of disco
signaled the final end of a commitment to liberal universalism. Instead, he argues, the 1970s proved to be a moment when
many citizens, not only minorities, turned toward a politics of identity which emphasized the wonders of diversity, but made
it more difficult to find common ground between Americans.” 336, Jay
• “Schulman argues that the Watergate scandal and the ensuing national cynicism about government only furthered Nixon’s
original goals of shifting the country to the right. According to Schulman, Watergate provided a boost to conservativism and
conservative Republicans because the basic lesson was that Americans could not trust their government.” 336, Jay
• “By the 1980s, Schulman argues that taxpayers and politicians alike turned “to the private sector to provide the amenities, the
services, the essentials of community that the public had once provided for itself” (215). In this way, the 1970s marked a
critical transformation from trust in government policies and programs to a faith in capitalism and its possibilities for
personal and community growth.” 337, Jay
• “a man who earned the nickname “Tricky Dick” by systematically undermining liberal programs without ever publicly
attacking them. Using the examples of federal funding fort he arts, low-income housing, and environmental programs, as
well as the never-implemented Family Assistance Plan, Schulman demonstrates how Nixon seemed to support traditional
liberal issues while simultaneously undermining the liberal power base. In arts funding, for example, Nixon allocated a huge
infusion of money to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but carefully
reappropriated how the money would be spent, shifting the fiscal power to regional and local levels and away from the
traditional northeastern cultural elite.” 334, Jay
Sources: Newspapers, music, propaganda, government records, journals
Connections: Leuchtenburg, Perils and FDR, Brinkley, End, Dawley, Struggles, Cohen, Making, Schulman, From Cotton Belt
John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (1992)
Argument: “This book…argues that the ability of the West to influence the nation grew with its population and its urbanization. The
West during the twentieth century remained a distinctive part of the United States, and it continued to exert a regional effect on
American civilization. In fact, a primary source of its separate identity and influence was its expanding cities. The Far West stood
apart from other sections not only because it had a higher percentage of urbanites, but also because its cities assumed a clearly
regional form and then transmitted that form to the rest of the country.” 2
• “Cities have been important to the Far West since the first onrush of Anglo-Americans during the mid-nineteenth century, yet
is proportion of urbanites as late as 1920 remained near the national average. After 1930, however, while urban growth in
other regions slackened, in the Far West it maintained its rapid pace. By the time of the 1970 census the West had become
the most highly urbanized of the four American sections, with 83 percent of its population dwelling in urban areas.” 1
• “By the mid-twentieth century, if not sooner, virgin cities had begun to replace virgin land in the minds of many Westerners
as the key image in defining the region. People imagined that the urban West (that is, the western metropolis with its central
city, suburbs, and nearby countryside) offered Americans a unique opportunity to live according to their preferences. In
contrast to other sections of the country, the region seemed less troubled by urban problems and more open to the
improvements in metropolitan design, social relations, and styles of living.” 2
• “The subsequent opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955, marked a new era of western land development that affected the
culture of the entire nation. The world’s first theme park applied Hollywood’s movie-making techniques to a threedimensional setting for fun-seekers in the Los Angeles area. Its impact, however, traveled far beyond the world of
entertainment, and far beyond the world of design and architecture across the United States.” 3
• “The land development began in 1951 as an undistinguished district intended to increase Stanford University’s income
through leases to light-industrial tenants. In 1954 and 1955, the park’s purpose changed. Frederick E. Terman, Stanford’s
dean of engineering, incorporated the park into his program to transform Stanford into a great research university by creating
a “community of technical scholars.” The university began to restrict tenancy in the industrial park to research-based
companies that would benefit Stanford academically as well as financially.” 3
• “Sun City was carefully tailored to senior citizens’ tastes and needs, as identified by market research. Capitalizing on the
growing financial independence and lengthening lifespan of the elderly, Sun City evolved from a population of strangers with
relatively modest means into a cohesive community of self-selected migrants from among the more affluent retirees in
American society.” 4
• “In 1955, businessmen conceived of a public project in downtown Seattle which would produce another innovative western
cityscape. Their proposal to host a world’s fair ultimately led to the Century 21 Exposition of 1962. Their chief motive was
to stimulate growth and renewal in the city’s central business district in order to help it compete against expanding suburbs.
And, indeed, the 1962 fairgrounds exerted lasting influence after the exposition by becoming the Seattle Center, perhaps the
most successful civic complex of its kind in the country. Contrary to the expectations of its planners, however, the Seattle
Center contributed less to renewing downtown than to dramatizing the increasing impact of suburban patterns on central
cities.” 4
• “More than earlier expositions, it was modeled on such suburban forms as theme parks and shopping malls, and it attracted a
crowd that was rather suburban in outlook and orientation. The cold war encouraged Century 21 to emphasize those
economic and technological forces responsible for the prosperous and futuristic character of Seattle and other western
metropolitan areas after World War II.” 5
16
“The four cityscapes were by no means typical American metropolitan districts, yet the constituted influential landmarks
that acted both as exemplars of the idea of virgin cities and as antidotes to the apparent chaos of their respective urban
milieus.” 5
• “But despite the country’s adherence to certain arguably unprogressive attitudes after World War II, it experienced
tremendous convulsions in the realms of material and popular culture that boldly challenged traditional ways, and in some
instances offered creative or liberating alternatives. During the years 1940-70, inventions ranging in size from the birthcontrol pill and the microprocessor to the Saturn rocket and Apollo spaceship helped to usher in attitudes that sometimes
differed radically from their predecessors. The American landscape experienced dramatic changes, too, facilitated by such
innovations as Levittowns and fast-food franchises and a national interstate highway system.” 6
• “Cities were affected by the same, ofttimes liberating forces that were at work throughout American material culture.” 6
• “The new American metropolis was depicted as “chaotic” and “formless,” “sprawling” and “fragmented,” a landscape in
“disequilibrium” and a society infected with “anomic”…Historians…have portrayed the recent American inner city as an
economic and social wasteland, the outer city or suburb as a cultural and moral wasteland, and the entire unmanageable entity
as a political wasteland.” 7
• “Although critics pointed to real and severe problems—environmental degradation, racial tension, urban poverty, a
weakening sense of community—many of them clung inflexibly to an increasingly obsolete ideal of city life, rooted in the
urban experience of the Northeast, in which strong central cities with vital downtowns dominated metropolitan areas.” 7
• “In the context of the traditional understanding of the city, the new urban shape indeed looked formless and sprawling and
chaotic. But in historical perspective it is easier to see changes in the city not as declension from a single ideal but as
movement away from an eastern model, based on nineteenth-century technologies, toward a western model, shaped more by
twentieth-century culture and by a distinctly different natural setting.” 7
• “this study relies heavily on a micro view of the western city in an attempt to understand how average people created, and
were affected by, a mid-twentieth-century urban culture. It relies especially on two types of information. First, it seeks to
understand how specific controlled environments were planned, built, managed, and used. Instead of looking at cities as
wholes, the following pages focus primarily on smaller parts of cities to see how designers created them and to see how
people experienced them—which was often in ways their designers had not anticipated. Because of their smaller scale, to
average citizens these special environments seemed more comprehensible than entire cities.” 8
• “The second level of micro analysis requires an examination of how inhabitants may have made sense of the cities in their
minds. Westerners embraced magic kingdoms not only because they were high-quality environments but also because they
made the surrounding metropolis seem more legible and more congruent with regional ideals…Average people proved adept
at drawing mental maps that found coherence in urban settings which struck others as chaotic.” 8
• “Many Westerners arrived at some sort of understanding of the metropolis only by simplifying it through mental maps, by
designing away contradictions in the cultural landscape, and by walling themselves off from the complications of city life.
Magic kingdoms attempted to exclude diversity and misery form their idealized settings, substituting in their stead a world
indexed to the middle-class standards of an affluent society. An understanding of these special environments, and of their
respective urban contexts, requires recognition of their implications of those minority and working-class groups who made up
a large part of the population of the western metropolis.” 9
• “Westerners also often excluded from their magic kingdoms much awareness of the escalating costs of the region’s pattern of
urban growth. They tended to treat carefully planned districts as refuges from the aesthetic and ecological realities of cities.
Only belatedly did they begin to perceive the detrimental implications of rapid expansion, and even of magic kingdoms, for
the special regional environment. Cities that had seemed virgin in 1950 or 1960 were by 1980 struggling to overcome severe,
unforeseen problems.” 9
• “Magic kingdoms of the urban West helped to define a new standard for what was normal on the American cityscape, and
their proliferation sustained at least some of the thinking that had helped to create them during the postwar years.” 10
• “In the pages that follow, the West is defined as a place, a process, and a state of mind. First it is understood to include the
eleven Mountain and Pacific states as defined by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, but not Alaska and Hawaii…Finally, the
West is understood to be the place that its inhabitants thought it was. This place of the mind was defined in large part by the
efforts of Westerners to contrast their region to a pervasive but rather ill-defined perception of the East. Seattle and Pheonix
and Denver were all different from one another, yet they shared not only their far western location and certain processes of
growth and change, but also their inhabitants’ tendency to identify with one region by explaining their presence there as the
rejection of another.” 10
• “Chapter 6 closes the book with the argument that magic kingdoms epitomized the process by which people came to terms
with their ever-changing cities in a manner that contributed to their identity as Westerners. Magic kingdoms played a key
role in reconciling city-dwellers to fluid settings. They acted as landmarks that heightened the legibility of the urban scene,
and they accelerated the growth of a feeling of maturity in relatively new cities by strengthening the sense of cultural
attainment.” 12
Sources: Disney papers, Stanford archives, municipal records, marketing research
Connections: Mohl, New, Dawley, Struggles, Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Limerick, Legacy, Avila, Popular Culture, Self,
American Babylon, Segrue, Urban, Jackson, Crabgrass, Kasson, Amusing, Cohen, Consumer’s
•
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (2004)
17
Argument: “Tracing the evolution of the spatial and racial divides of the city back to the Progressive Era, [Avila] argues that the
period from 1940 to 1970 marked a watershed in Los Angeles history in which the heterosocial vision of New Deal liberalism was
replaced by the homogeneous and privatized perspective of New Right conservativism. Such popular culture institutions as film noir,
Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and freeways—all of which came of age after the proliferation of the automobile—reflected and
reinforced a racial and spatial order of “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs” in which a “privatized, consumer-oriented subjectivity
premised upon patriarchy, whiteness, and suburban home ownership” dominated urban policy making.” 272, Simpson
• “Essentially, cultural history is the history of stories that people tell about themselves and their world.” Xiii
•
“Race is a primary category of analysis in this study of popular culture; space is another. Spaces, like time, is an arbiter of
social relations, and the identities we inhabit—race, class, gender, sexuality—are codified within a set of spaces that we
describe as neighborhoods, homes, cities, streets, suburbs, parks, factories, office buildings, freeways, and so on. More than
providing a physical setting for the formation of such identities, space—its organization, construction, destruction, and
representation—plays an active role in shaping social consciousness.” Xiv
• “In the age of urban renewal, highway construction, and suburbanization, the spatial reorganization of the American city
gave rise to a new racial awareness that, for better or for worse, still grips our collective imagination.” Xv
• “In their pursuit of new cultural experiences, postwar Americans opted for something different—an emergent sociospatial
order that promised a respite from the well-known dangers and inconveniences of the modern city: congestion, crime,
pollution, anonymity, promiscuity, and diversity. The search for order provided an underlying impetus for the post-World
War II phase of mass suburbanization and it is the subject of this book.” Xv
• “In 1970, Bob Carpenter, owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, removed his team from its inner-city locale. The owner based
his decision on his conviction that baseball was no longer a “paying proposition” at Shibe Park and that the park’s location in
“an undesirable neighborhood” meant that white baseball fans “would not come to a black neighborhood” to see a ball
game.” 2
• “Ebbets Field, Riverview Park, Coney Island, and their counterparts in other American cities all depended on the streetcar to
bring a steady influx of pleasure seekers and sports enthusiasts, but that too became a relic after World War II. The mass
adoption of the automobile began during the 1920s, but by the postwar period, public and private agencies concentrated their
resources on the construction of an elaborate network of highways, leaving streetcars to fall into disrepair. The
disappearance of the streetcars undermined the popularity of urban ballparks, amusement parks, and other urban cultural
institutions whose inner-city location lost favor with a new generation of motorists whose daily activities became
increasingly dictated by the availability of parking space.” 2
• “The inclusiveness of modern city culture, however, was predicated on the strict exclusion of African Americans an, to a
lesser extent, other racial groups. European immigrants to the American city at the turn of the twentieth century converged
on the shared spaces of work, housing, and leisure, but African Americans encountered rigid racial barriers that blocked their
access to white neighborhoods and jobs in cities of both the North and the South.” 3
• “The operators of amusement parks, nickelodeons, dance halls, and ballparks typically adopted a whites-only policy, forcing
African Americans to pursue their appetite for diversion in separate and sometimes inferior cultural facilities.” 3
• “The cosmopolitan culture of the turn-of-the-century metropolis was thus achieved only by aggressively excluding and
stereotyping African Americans and by upholding entrenched patterns of racial segregation. In short, the new mass culture
reinforced a mutually constitutive relationship between public and white.” 4
• “The New Deal and the subsequent outbreak of World War II profoundly unsettled the spatial and racial organization of
American society. The intersection of technological innovations, government policies, demographic upheaval, and other
factors linked not by causality but rather by coincidence anticipated the arrival of the postwar urban region, which did not
fully materialize until the 1950s and 1960s.” 4
• “In particular, World War II initiated yet another mass migration of African Americans into the nation’s cities, arguably the
most significant demographic shift of the twentieth century. Fleeing a legacy of poverty and racism in the South, millions of
African Americans converged on urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West, where the wartime economy was at
its most vibrant. Black migrants ot the cities met substantial hostility there: a spate of race riots during the early 1940s
signaled the intense level of competition among racially diverse peoples in search of steady employment and affordable
housing.” 4
• “If black became increasingly synonymous with urban during the war years and thereafter, suburban development after
World War II sanctioned the formation of a new “white” identity.” 5
• “federally sponsored suburbanization removed an expanding category of “white” Americans from what deteriorated into
inner-city reservations of racialized poverty. The collusion of public policy and private practices enforced a spatial
distinction between “black” cities and “white” suburbs and gave shape to what the Kerner Commission, a presidential
commission appointed to assess the causes of the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, identified as “two societies, one black,
one white—separate and unequal.”” 5
• “Clinton delivered a wake-up call to white America to signal that it could not maintain its distance from black America
much longer; “Movin’ in on ya, gainin on ya! Can’t you feel my breath, heh…All up around your neck, heh heh.” Striking a
chord of defiant pride, “Chocolate City” envisioned black urbanizaion as nothing less than a national insurrection led by
James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and other luminaries of Afro-American culture.” 5
• “Like suburbanization, urban renewal hastened the racial and spatial polarization of postwar Southern California, and the
imposition of Dodger Stadium upon a working-class Chicano community nourished the regional development of a racialized
18
political culture. The westward migration of the Brooklyn Dodgers signified the shifting paradigms of race and space in
postwar America, as racial succession dislodged the Brooklyn Dodgers from Ebbets Field and racial dislocation under the
guise of urban renewal placed them in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine. As the nation’s first racially integrated ball club, the
Dodgers elicited the patronage of various racial and ethnic groups, but the substitution of Dodger Stadium for Ebbets Field
reveals not only the westward drift of cultural capital, but also how the spacial culture of postwar suburbia redefined the
public experience of spectator sports as well as that of the inner city itself.” 9
• “Southern California’s pattern of suburban decentralization during the postwar period reinforced race as a common
dominator in the dialectic between the production and consumption of the new “new mass culture.” It enabled Walt Disney
to inundate Disneyland with stereotypical representations of mammies and Indian “savages.” It allowed Walter O’Malley to
build his stadium atop a working-class Chicano community. It granted the imposition of freeways in the middle of
expanding ghettos and barrios, and it empowered men such as Ronald Reagan to mobilize white suburban homeowners as a
political constituency.” 14
Sources: municipal records, government records, Disney records, Dodgers records
Connections: Findlay, Magic, Mohl, New, Dawley, Struggles, Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Limerick, Legacy, Self, American
Babylon, Segrue, Urban, Jackson, Crabgrass, Kasson, Amusing, Cohen, Consumer’s
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)
Argument: “This book…suggests that the space around us—the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses, and
apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior.” 3
• “Suburbia symbolizes the fullest, most unadulterated embodiment of contemporary culture; it is a manifestation of such
fundamental characteristics of American society as conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the private automobile, upward
mobility, the separation of the family into nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency
toward racial and economic exclusiveness.” 4
• “American suburbs come in every type, shape, and size: rich and poor, industrial and residential, new and old.” 5
• “Dozens of peripheral communities are heavily industrial, while others have such rigid zoning restrictions that all apartments
are excluded from their quiet precinct.” 5
• “The first distinguishing element of metropolitan areas in this nation is their low residential density and the absence of sharp
divisions between town and country. In all cultures, the price of land falls with greater and greater distance from city centers.
Thus, the amount of space devoted to a single dwelling will always logically be greater on the periphery than at the center. In
international terms, however, the structure of American settlement is loose, the decline in density (the density curve) is
gradual, and land-use planning is weak.” 6
• “The second distinguishing residential feature of American culture is a strong penchant for homeownership.” 7
• “The third and most important distinguishing characteristic of our housing pattern is the socioeconomic distinction between
the center and the periphery. In the United States, status and income correlate with suburbs, the area that provides the
bedrooms for an overwhelming proportion of those with college educations, of those engaged in professional pursuits, and of
those in the upper-income brackets.” 8
• “The fourth and final distinguishing characteristic of the United States residential experience is the length of the average
journey-to-work, whether measured in miles or minutes.” 10
• “This book attempts to account for the divergence of the American experience from that of the rest of the world. How and
why did Americans change their assumptions about the good life in the industrial and postindustrial age?” 10
• “This book then investigates the dynamics of urban land use, the process of city growth through the past, and the ways in
which Americans coming together in metropolitan areas have arranged their activities.” 10
• “The working definition of suburbs in this book has four components: function (non-farm residential), class (middle and
upper status), separation (a daily journey-to-work), and density (low relative to older sections).” 11
• “Thus, the suburb as a residential place, as the site of scattered dwellings and businesses outside city walls, is as old as
civilization and an important part of the ancient, medieval, and early modern urban traditions. However, suburbanization as a
process involving the systematic growth of fringe areas at a pace more rapid than that of core cities, as a lifestyle involving a
daily commute to jobs in the center, occurred first in the United States and Great Britain, where it can be dated from about
1815.” 13
• “The revolutionary nature of the suburbanization process can best be demonstrated by reviewing the five spatial
characteristics shared by every major city in the world in 1815…The first important characteristic of the walking city was
congestion…The second important characteristic of the walking city was the clear distinction between city and country…The
third important characteristic of the walking city was its mixture of functions. Except for the waterfront warehousing and
red-light activities there were no neighborhoods exclusively given over to commercial, office, or residential functions…The
fourth important characteristic of the walking city was the short distance its inhabitants lived from work…The final important
characteristic of the walking city was the tendency of the most fashionable and respectable addresses to be located close to
the center of the city.” 15
• “Suburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of
civilization. This basic cultural and spatial arrangement was essentially the same around the world, and metropolises as
different as Edo (Tokyo), London, Melbourne, New York, and Paris were remarkably alike. Even the word suburb suggested
inferior manners, narrowness of view, and physical squalor.” 19
19
“Between 1950 and 1970, the suburban population doubled from 36 to 74 million, and 83 percent of the nation’s total
growth took place in suburbs.” 283
• “The term “sprawl” became a new Americanism as subdivisions and shopping centers sprouted across the landscape.” 284
• “As larger numbers of affluent citizens moved out, jobs followed. In turn, this attracted more families, more roads, and more
industries. The cities were often caught in a reverse cycle. As businesses and taxpayers left, the demand for middle-to
upper-income dwelling units in older neighborhoods declined. At the same time, population increases among low-income
minorities, coupled with the demolition of inner-city housing for new expressways, produced an increase in the demand for
low-income housing. The new residents required more health care and social-welfare services from the city government than
did the old, but they were less able to pay for them. To increase expenditures, municipal authorities levied higher property
taxes, thus encouraging middle-class homeowners to leave, causing the cycle to repeat.” 285
Sources: census data, secondary sources
Connections: Findlay, Magic, Mohl, New, Dawley, Struggles, Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Limerick, Legacy, Self, American
Babylon, Segrue, Urban, Kasson, Amusing, Cohen, Consumer’s, Avila, Popular Culture
•
Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998)
Argument: “I hope that this book has persuaded its readers that the basic obligations of citizenship have always been demanded of
women; it is the forms and objects of that demand that have varied over time. Impoverished women, whether black or white, have
never been able to claim the fictional “constitutional” right to be “ladies.” Women with property have at least the responsibility to be
realists: to ask at whose expense they have claimed that fictive right. And even if, having considered the situation, a majority of
women should conclude that they do indeed want to be “ladies” and to collect the “wages of gender,” as a historian I can only reply
that those wages are not there to be collected.” 309
• “In this book I have tried to emphasize the distinction between social duties voluntarily undertaken and obligations imposed
by the state. As long as married women were understood to owe virtually all their obligation to their husbands they could
make no claims of rights against the political community. The femme covert, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had
been told in 1805, had “no political relation to the state any more than an alien…Not until 1992 did the Supreme Court
specifically announce that it would no longer recognize the power of husbands over the bodies of their wives. That is the
moment when coverture, as a living legal principle, died.” 305-307
• ““Citizen” is an equalizing word. It carries with it the activism of Aristotle’s definition—a citizen is one who rules and is
ruled in turn. Modern citizenship was created as part of the new political order courageously constructed in the era of the
American Revolution. Reaching back to the Greeks and reinventing what they discovered, the founding generation produced
a new and reciprocal relationship between state and citizen. They used a capacious rhetoric that ignores differences of
gender, race and ethnicity, religion and class; any free person who had not fled with the British or explicitly denounced the
patriots was a citizen. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment permitted no formal categories of first- and secondclass citizens. Philosophically, all persons (whether or not they are citizens) are entitled to equal protection of the laws, and
all citizens are bound equally to the state in a web of rights and obligations.” Xx
• “Women have been citizens of the United States as long as the republic has existed. Passports were issued to them. They
could be naturalized; they could claim the protection of the courts. They were subject to the laws and obliged to pay taxes.
But from the beginning American women’s relationship to the state has been different in substantial and important respects
from that of men.” Xx-xxi
• “In the liberal tradition, rights are implicitly paired with obligation. The right to enjoy a trial by jury is mirrored by an
obligation to serve on juries if called upon. The right to enjoy the protection of the state against disorder is linked to an
obligation to bear arms in its defense. The right to enjoy the benefits of government is linked to an obligation to be loyal to
it and to pay taxes to support it. Obligation is the means by which the state can use its power to constrain the freedoms of
individual citizens.” Xxi
• “But in this book I use [obligation] only in its primary sense—to be bound, to be constrained, to be under compulsion. I treat
as obligations only those duties that invite state punishment if they are not performed.” Xxi
• “In this book I treat five distinct obligations that rest on American citizens. Two are shared with all inhabitants: the
obligations to pay taxes and to avoid vagrancy (that is, to appear to be a respectable working person.) Two are occasionally
also imposed on resident aliens: the obligation to serve on juries and the obligation to risk one’s life in military service, to
submit to being placed in harm’s way when the state chooses. (This obligation has slipped out of common conversation since
the advent of the All-Volunteer Force in 1975, but it is a real one, and when we consider the meanings of citizenship we
ignore it at our peril.) Only citizens bear the obligation to refrain from treason. Two of these obligations are negative ones.
We do not try to measure the loyalty of citizens, but we think we can know when they are traitors. Instead of an enforceable
obligation to be loyal—we have no legal obligation to say the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, nor does the state normally
seek to measure degrees of loyalty—we have a negative obligation to refrain from treason. Similarly, as a society we have
valued work but have never insisted that every person must work.” Xxii
• “But the United States absorbed, virtually unrevised, the traditional English system of law governing the relationship between
husbands and wives. The old law of domestic relations began from the principle that at marriage the husband controlled the
20
physical body of the wife….There followed from this premise the elaborate system of coverture. By treating married
women as “covered” by their husbands’ civic identity, by placing sharp constraints on the extent to which married women
controlled their bodies and their property, the old law of domestic relations ensured that—with few exceptions, like the
obligation to refrain from treason—married women’s obligations to their husbands and families overrode their obligations to
the state.”xxii
• “Coverture originally encompassed relations between parents (especially father) and children and between masters and
servants. The early republic did away with many of those elements, but the asymmetrical relationship outlined in “the law of
baron and feme” (master and woman, or lord and lady) remained.” Xxiii
• “But the wages of gender are not privelege. They are the residue of the old system of domestic relations, the system of
coverture that excused married women from civic obligations because married women owed their primary obligation to their
husbands. Women never collected the “wages of gender.” They paid the wages of gender directly to their husbands rather
than directly to the state. Unless we look at the entire system of rights and obligations, we will not understand that.” 304
• “Rights and obligations are reciprocal elements of citizenship. Rights are pleasing to contemplate: it is invigorating to be
assured, as historian Hendrik Hartog has phrased it, that Americans share “an intense persuasion that…when we are wronged
there must be remedies, that patterns of illegitimate authority can be challenged, that public power must contain institutional
mechanisms capable of undoing injustice.”” 304
• “As women’s independent rights to property, suffrage, and bodily integrity were slowly established, the complementary
practices of substituting family duties for civic obligation slowly crumbled. The role of the Republican Mother, who fulfilled
her civic obligations through her service to her family, substituting private choices for public obligation, had been marked as
problematic as early as the 1840s by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues. But well into the twentieth century,
American law and practice continued to breathe oxygen into the customs of coverture, for all the world as though the
Republican Mother were the Resusci-Annie manikin now widely used in cardiopulmonary resuscitation training.” 305
• “The agenda of Second Wave feminism, the women’s movement of the late twentieth century, included many items that
attacked elements of the old law of domestic relations still vibrant after more than two hundred years.” 305-306
• “The 1963 report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women clearly revealed that women—whether single,
married, or formerly married—were severely disadvantaged in seeking credit, on the job market, or when they turned to
alimony for support. Second Wave feminism was soaked with suspicion of republican motherhood and maternalist credits,
permeated by skepticism that civic credits banked as wives and mothers could be reliably reclaimed, filled with anxious
warnings to young women to distrust the promises of coverture.” 306
• “Central to the agendas of feminism, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time to our own, has been a program of legal change that
sought to eliminate the legacies of coverture. The ending of coverture has been an extended process, accompanied by an
almost willful insistence by many scholars that coverture and the problems it raised never really existed, or existed so long
ago as to be antique.” 306
• “The political history of women in the United States is generally told as three separate stories. The first is the long struggle
for suffrage, successful in 1920; the second, sometimes omitted entirely, is the period 1920-70 that some historians have
called “the doldrums,” during which little progressive change was made; the third is the account of Second Wave feminism,
energized by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1971 that discrimination on the basis of sex could indeed be recognized as
unequal treatment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.” 306-307
• “But the political history of women in the United States is better understood as a single narrative. Different generations
brought to their tasks different energies and faced different opponents, some more formidable than others. Even after
suffrage, the agenda that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues had articulated at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848
largely remained to be accomplished. Rather than describing the years after 1920 as “the doldrums,” we can now see them as
a period when the resistance to progressive change for women was powerful and successful. The American Medical
Association had not seriously resisted suffrage, but it did fight vigorously the Sheppard-Towners legislation of the 1920s,
which sought to expand prenatal care for pregnant women; the National Association of Manufacturers had not resisted
suffrage, but it did fight effectively against the Child Labor Amendment; the opening of vast educational opportunities to
male World War II veterans was accompanied by attacks on women for taking up classroom seats that could be held by a
man. Reformers who learned their politics in the years of “the doldrums” would be indispensable to the successes of the
1970s and thereafter; they are part of the same narrative.” 307
• “There is no constitutional right to be a lady or a gentleman, excused from obligations borne by ordinary women and men.
Equality is the great principle, and in Anglo-American legal tradition equality has always meant simultaneously common law
and equity, sameness and difference shaped to authentic equality in the world which living people inhabit.” 310
Sources: legal records, diaries, newspapers, movement literature
Connections: Rosen, World, Kerber, Republic, Norton, “Evolution,” Cott, Grounding, May, Homeward, Wulf, Not All Wives,
Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, Cohen, Consumer’s, Douglas, Where the Girls, de Hart and Mathews, Sex, Gender, Lemann,
Promised
Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)
Argument: “The standard of interpretation of the early twentieth-century women’s movement marks the 1920 as the year of the
critical divide: before 1920 the suffrage movement flourished, and after 1920 women’s activism declined. In this impressive work,
21
Nancy F. Cott reinterprets the 1910s and 1920s as years of crucial transition when modern feminism first challenged the older
“woman movement.” 983, Meyerowitz
• “Unlike the nineteenth-century “woman movement,” feminism emphasized women’s diversity rather than women’s shared
sphere. Thriving within the networks of the suffrage coalition, feminists elevated women’s rights over women’s duties.
Often with self-conscious flamboyance, they called for individuality, full political participation, economic independence, and
vaguely defined sexual freedom.” 983, Meyerowitz
• “Feminists wanted equality with men but also emphasized women’s differences from men. While they sought women’s
unity, they recognized women’s diversity. They wanted gender consciousness but also hoped to eliminate gender roles.
Those paradoxes generated conflict in the 1920s as the possibility of an ebullient feminist movement foundered.” 983,
Meyerowitz
• “Meanwhile, advertisers and psychologists undermined the feminist language of choice and freedom by using it to promote
consumerism, femininity, and traditional domesticity.” 984, Meyerowitz
• “By 1930 many women activists had turned to a “compromise area” on which they could agree: They called for equality of
opportunity and individual advancement rather than collective action. The feminism of the 1910s was thus “unfulfilled,”
making the resurgence of feminism “necessary as much as it made it possible.” 984, Meyerowitz
• “Her story of “the birth of feminism” in its American variety begins in the tumultuous 1910s. Advanced college girls, strongwilled society matrons, union maids, independent careerists displayed a new image of womanhood. Their very existence
challenged older notions of female decorum and difference from men. They saw their lives as social statement, and their
politics were often explicitly radical, demanding the vote but also economic independence and sexual freedom.” 448, Palmer
• “Cott’s first chapter captures the excitement when women felt that they might march toward the future as men’s comrades,
rather than their helpmates.” 448, Palmer
• “Even though [Cott’s] demonstration of intellectual and organizational energies directed to improving women’s lot proves
that feminism did not expire when suffrage was won, the 1920s look anemic compared to the vibrance of “birth.” 449, Palm
• “Activists of the 1920s limited themselves to advocating reforms within traditional marital, maternal, feminine norms.
Women’s clubs concentrated on international peace (women’s most radical postwar activity and one Cott returns to in her
valedictory chapter), and improvement of conditions for mothers and housewives, as well as protection for low-paid workers.
Ambitious women aspired to recognition in male-dominated professions and partisan politics. A legislative measure, an
Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, was their most extreme demand. Worthy though these aims were, they seem to
retreat from prewar advocacy of socialism, suffrage militancy, sexual freedom, and abolition of marriage.” 449, Palmer
• “Contrary to the view the feminism was crushed along with other prewar radicalism, Cott stresses that women’s
organizations remained strong during the 1920s; indeed, “it is highly probable that the greatest extent of associational activity
in the whole history of American women took place in the era between the two world wars, after women became voters and
before a great proportion of them entered the labor force” (97). They joined groups to influence public decisions—from
disarmament and peace to birth control and better housekeeping. Women affiliated on ethnic, religious, patriotic,
professional, parental, and racial lines.” 450, Palmer
• “Before the war, Cott notes, when women took public stands, they implicitly upheld a principle that women were capable of
more than domesticity and obedience to men. In the postwar, postsuffrage era, women were simply exercising their newlyconfirmed civic standing; they were being good citizens just like men. “Most [women’s club] members [would not] have
recognized themselves as feminists”; indeed, some opposed feminism.” 450, Palmer
• “[Alice] Paul single-mindedly created a loyal band committed to what she saw as the essential next battle—the fight for an
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to guarantee full legal equality with men. Her focus had the advantage or simplicity and
directness (which were to be immensely attractive to American women in the 1970s ERA battle), but it also “broke
Feminism’s connection with sex rights and social revolution (81).” 450, Palmer.
• The National Women’s Party’s “narrow-minded hostility to what Alice Pail considered diversionary issues split AfroAmerican and working-class, labor union women off from white, middle-class, official feminism. When black women
would-be-voters asked for help to protest southern intimidation against their voting, Paul saw this as a “racial” and not a
‘feminist’ issue” (69). When labor reformers advocated protective laws to ease the exploitation of poorly-paid nonunion
women workers, Paul responded with stores of qualified women denied jobs that protected men from competition.”451, Palm
• “Alice Paul and other feminists held a romantic vision that a job guaranteed economic independence and self-respect; they
were unmoved by Women’s Bureau research showing that most women’s jobs did not pay a living wage. Political
animosities grew from a feminism divided between aiding women as a class, and seeking the advancement of individuals of
the female sex—when the only model of achievement was male.” 451, Palmer
• “Feminism, [Cott] suggests, pointed women toward two contradictory paths—individual liberty or female solidarity—and
feminists were thereby rendered immobile. White, middle-class, heterosexual women generally, however, found that
feminism articulated ideals and promises of self-development; it defined “modernity.” The second half of the book describes
how these women thought out their lives, forced to choose between a Human Self or a Female Self.” 451, Palmer
• “Using feminism as a context reveals that women wanted to be modern, informed, productive, scientifically-competent at
their old jobs of housework and child rearing, and at new jobs in professions. Far from being traditionalists hostile to social
change, women sought up-to-date ideas.” 451, Palmer
22
“First, they sought to be better wives, mothers, and housekeepers, pursing new disciplines in home economics, child
development, and parent education. Advertisers rapidly directed aspirations into consumption, and readers scanned their
messages seeking to be wiser mothers, more efficient houseworkers, and sexier wives.” 451, Palmer
• “Women also sought incomes, when the “proposal of economic independence…was as radical as the proposal of political
citizenship for all women had been” in 1848 (185). Since state marriage laws upheld a basic contract in which husbands
provided income and wives owed domestic services, in which women who advocated a division of their labor between career
and marriage were essentially taking back part of their labor output for themselves. Cott points out that only middle-class
women whose earnings paid for housework subsistutions envisioned this as liberation. In the working-class, employment
outside simply meant being a “two-job wife,” the 1920s version of what 1980s feminists call the double day.” 452, Palmer
• “By the end of the 1920s, Cott concludes, feminism looked either “archaic,” since, by contrast to earlier centuries, women
had educational, sexual, and political rights, or it looked revolutionary: demanding that women move beyond gender roles.
Reconciliation awaited the revival of feminism in the 1960s.” 452, Palmer
• “Cott herself argues that white, middle-class, heterosexual women who debated which feminist course to follow (or which
course was feminism) could afford to see sex difference as the only issue of concern to women, because other social
inequalities—or race, class, sexual orientation—were not problems for them.” 452, Palmer
• Feminism’s “proponents explicitly distinguished it from suffragism, despite their vital connections with the suffrage
movement. The meaning of Feminism (capitalized at first) also differed from the woman movement. It was both broader
and narrower: broad in intent, proclaiming revolution in all the relations of the sexes, and narrower in the range of its willing
adherents. As an ism (an ideology) it presupposed a set of principles not necessarily belonging to every woman—nor limited
to women.” 3
Sources: NWP literature, journals, newspapers, legislation, propaganda
Connections: Rosen, World, Kerber, Republic, Norton, “Evolution,” Kerber, No Constitutional, May, Homeward, Wulf, Not All
Wives, Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, Cohen, Consumer’s, Douglas, Where the Girls, de Hart and Mathews, Sex, Gender, Lemann,
Promised
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)
Argument: “May argues that the ideology of the Cold War had a major impact on American domesticity during the 1950s, affecting
everything from the design of suburban houses to relations between the sexes. “The context of the cold war,” she writes, “points to
previously unrecognized connections between political and familial values” (10). Thus, phenomena such as the baby boom and the
feminine mystique did not develop in a snug domestic cocoon, isolated form the other events of the postwar years. They were direct
responses to the Cold War and to the anxieties it created. In May’s view, the postwar rush to marriage and baby-making, white
middle-class Americans’ embrace of traditional gender roles, and their new-found commitment to family life were all responses to
“the terrors of the atomic age” (23). Both foreign policy and family life were characterized by a quest for security and an attempt to
contain potentially dangerous forces.” 301-302, Boylan
• “This is a powerful image of the nuclear family in the nuclear age: isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and
protected against impending doom by the wonders of modern technology.” Ix
• “For in the early years of the cold war, amid a world of uncertainties brought about by World War II and its aftermath, the
home seemed to offer a secure private nest removed form the dangers of the outside world.” Ix
• “The bomb-shelter honeymooners were part of a cohort of Americans who lowered the age at marriage for both men and
women, and quickly brought the birthrate to a twentieth-century high after more than a hundred years of steady decline,
producing the “baby boom.”” Ix
• “Americans of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups, of all socio-economic classes and educational levels, married younger
and had more children than at any other time in the twentieth century.” Ix
• “Scholars and observers frequently point to the family boom as the inevitable result of a return to peace and prosperity. They
argue that depression-weary Americans were eager to put the disruptions and hardships of war behind them and enjoy the
abundance at home. There is, of course, some truth to this claim, but prosperity followed other wars in our history, notably
World War I, with no similar increase in marriage and childbearing.” Xiii
• “The demographic explosion in the American family represented a temporary disruption of long-term trends. It lasted only
until the baby-boom children came of age.” Xiv
• “Poverty excluded many from suburban affluence; racism excluded others. Nevertheless, experts and officials ignored these
realities and insisted that the combined forces of democracy and prosperity would bring the fruits of the “good life” to all.
They perceived class divisions as particularly dangerous, because dissatisfied workers might be drawn to left-wing political
agitation, leading to socialism or even communism. According to the cold war ethos of the time, class conflict within the
United States would harm our image abroad, strengthen the Soviet Union, and weaken the nation, making it vulnerable to
communism.” Xviii
• “many leaders, pundits, and observers worried that the real dangers to America were internal ones: racial strife, emancipated
women, class conflict, and familial disruption. To alleviate these fears, Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety
in an insecure world, while experts, leaders and politicians promoted codes of conduct and enacted public policies that would
bolster the American home. Like their leaders, most Americans agreed that family stability appeared to be the best bulwark
against the dangers of the cold war.” xviii
• “These widely held beliefs and the public policies they generated led to some dramatic transformations in American society;
beyond the rush into marriage, childbearing and domesticity. Most importantly, they blurred class lines while sharpening
•
23
racial divisions. The massive infusion of federal funds into the expansion of affordable single family homes in suburban
developments made it possible for white working-class families to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Second generation
European immigrants moved out of their ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, leaving their kinship networks, along with their
outsider status, behind. Postwar prosperity and the promise of assimilation made it possible for ethnic Americans with white
skin to blend into the homogenous suburbs. Jews and Catholics joined Anglo-Saxon Protestants in these all-white
communities, even if they could not join their country clubs or social gatherings.” Xviii
• “People of color were excluded from these suburban communities, and denied the benefits of American prosperity even if
they could afford them. With very few notable exceptions, residential segregation defined the postwar suburbs.” Xix
• “But the strategic alliance between the national government and Civil Rights leaders required that the movement remain
limited to legal and political rights, which were consistent with principles of equal opportunity.” Xix
• “The focus on political rights allowed the government to support aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the
dismantling of the Jim Crow system in the South, while doing nothing to alleviate residential segregation or the widespread
poverty that kept Americans of color at the bottom of the society.” Xix
• “In Homeward Bound, public policy and political ideology are brought to bear on the study of private life, locating the family
within the larger political culture, not outside it. This approach illuminates both the cold war ideology and the domestic
revival as two sides of the same coin: post-war Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the
future.” Xxi
• “The cosmopolitan urban culture represented a decline in the self-reliant entrepreneurial spirit, posing a threat to the national
security that was perceived as akin to the danger of communism itself. Indeed, the two were often conflated in
anticommunist rhetoric. The domestic ideology emerged as a buffer against those disturbing tendencies. Yet domesticity
ultimately fostered the very tendencies it was intended to diffuse: materialism, consumerism, and bureaucratic conformity.
This inherent tension defined the symbiotic connection between the culture of the cold war and the domestic revival.
Rootless Americans struggled against what they perceived as internal decay. The family seemd to offer a psychological
fortress that would protect them against themselves. Bolstered by scientific expertise and wholesome abundance, it might
ward off the hazards of the age.” Xxi
• “It was not, as common wisdom tells us that last gasp of “traditional” family life with roots deep in the past. Rather, it was
the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members’ personal needs through an energized
and expressive personal life.” Xxii
• “The most severe censure was reserved for gay men and lesbians. Harsh repression and widespread institutionalized
homophobia followed quickly in the wake of wartime, when gay and lesbian communities had flourished. As anticommunist crusades launched investigations to root out “perverts” in the government, homosexuality itself became a mark of
potential subversive activity, grounds for dismissal from jobs, and justification for official and unofficial persecution. To
escape the status of pariah, many gay men and lesbians locked themselves in the stifling closet of conformity, hiding their
sexual identities and passing as heterosexuals.” Xxiii-xxiv
• “The responses of individuals to the KLS breathe life into contemporary values and reveal how postwar Americans fortified
the boundaries within which they lived. They wanted secure jobs, secure homes, and secure marriages in a secure country.
Security would enable them to take advantage of the fruits of prosperity and peace that were, at long last, available. And so
they adhered to an overarching principle that would guide them in their personal and political lives: containment.
Containment was the key to security.” xxiv
Sources: E. Lowell Kelly survey, movies, magazines, newspapers, government records
Connections: Rosen, World, Cott, Grounding, Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, Cohen, Consumer’s, Douglas, Where the Girls, de Hart
and Mathews, Sex, Gender, Lemann, Promised, Kerber, No Constitutional, Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, Sanchez, Becoming,
Joanne Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994)
Argument: “Taken together, the essays point first the diversity among women and the multifarious activities in which they engaged.
The essays demonstrate that women’s sense of themselves included not only gender identity—their sense of themselves as women—
but also their interrelated class, racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, occupational, and political identities. The essays also suggest that the
postwar public discourse on women was more complex than often portrayed. The address the postwar domestic stereotype and its
meanings, how and where it was produced, and the manifold ways that women appropriated, transformed, and challenged it. They
investigate the competing voices within the public discourse on women and the internal contradictions that undermined and
destabilized the domestic stereotype even as it was constructed.” 2
• “Until recently, U.S. women’s historians paid less attention to the years from 1945 and 1960 than they did to the years before
and after them. For historians, women of the postwar era, it seems, were less captivating than women workers during World
War II or political activists of the 1960s.” 2
• “In the postwar era, Friedan argued, social scientists, educators, advertisers, and magazine editors promoted a conservative
ideal, “the feminine mystique,” that portrayed women as happy housewives whose fulfillment derived solely form marriage,
motherhood, and family. This ideal, Friedan claimed, damaged American women and trapped them in the suburban home.
With The Feminine Mystique, Friedan gave a name and a voice to housewives’ discontent, but she also homogenized
American women and simplified postwar ideology; she reinforced the stereotype that portrayed all postwar women as
middle-class, domestic, and suburban, and she caricatured the popular ideology that she said had suppressed them.” 3
24
“While no serious historian can deny the conservatism of the postwar era or the myriad constraints that women
encouraged, an unrelenting focus on women’s subordination erases much of the history of the postwar years. It tends to
downplay women’s agency and to portray women primarily as victims. It obscures the complexity of postwar culture and the
significant social and economic changes of the postwar era. Sometimes it also inadvertently bolsters the domestic stereotype.
Especially in works on the 1950s, the sustained focus on a white middle-class domestic ideal and on suburban middle-class
housewives sometimes renders other ideals and other women invisible.” 4
• “This anthology is a sampler of current work on postwar U.S. women’s history, a first attempt to bring new pieces of
scholarship into one volume.: 5
• “Several themes emerge from these essays, suggesting the contours of a new and multifaceted history of women and gender
in the postwar United States. First and foremost, these essays displace the domestic stereotype, the June Cleavers and Donna
Reeds, from the center of historical study. To give just one example, Xiolan Boa’s essay on Chinese women garment
workers in New York City reminds us that postwar women included immigrants fresh off the boat, newcomers to the city.
As federal immigration policy changed, a massive influx of Chinese women transformed a predominantly male Chinese
American community. Despite the postwar growth of suburbs and the service sector, the new immigrants moved into and
revitalized an urban ethnic neighborhood and an urban industry. Along with the other essays in this volume, Bao’s study
demonstrates what should be obvious: that American women were culturally and ethnically diverse during the postwar years,
just as they were during other historical eras.” 5
• “Postwar women reformers, Susan Lynn explains, showed a concerted interest in issues of race. As the civil rights movement
blossomed, black and white women worked together, not without difficulty, to battle racism. They employed the traditional
pressure-group tactic of earlier women’s organizations, but they also emphasized the transformative power of interpersonal
relations. In this way, they foreshadowed the “personal politics” and consciousness raising of the 1960s.” 7
• “Just as black women engaged in community organizing and protest in the African American South, so Chicanas engaged in
community organizing and protest in the Mexican American West. In the Community Service Organization (CSO), Margaret
Rose reports, women and men, predominately Mexican American and working class, forged a coalition of local organizations
in which “women’s issues”—neighborhood safety, education, health care—moved to the center of civic activism.” 7
Connections: Rosen, World, Cott, Grounding, Cohen, Consumer’s, Douglas, Where the Girls, de Hart and Mathews, Sex, Gender,
Lemann, Promised, Kerber, No Constitutional, Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, Sanchez, Becoming, May, Homeward
Donald G. Mathews and Jane Sherron Dr Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of the ERA (1990)
Argument: “Essentially, the conflict [over ERA] was about gender. The amendment’s focus was “on account of sex.” And “sex”
was the activating word even thought it was misleading. As on North Carolina activist recalled, “The debate on the Equal Rights
Amendment was about gender; people got excited about it because they thought it was as ‘sex.’” “Gender” is the meaning our society
and culture attaches to sexual differences. “Sex” is the biological distinction between male and female that—at least before the
performance of sex-change operations and chromosome counts in East German female athletes—was thought to be natural and
immutable. “Sex” is also an obsession in American life, whether in entertainment, politics, religion, or commerce. While “sex” was
the word written into the amendment and the word opponents used to give their position an explicit concreteness, the issue of “gender”
suffuses ratification discourse. This issue transformed the contest for ratification from the politics of sex to the politics of gender.” xii
• “the struggle for ERA had politicized women as had no other issue since suffrage. The nature of that poiliticization was
especially evident in those important unratifying states where the length and intensity of conflict revealed a complex mixture
of emotions, convictions, and values that made of the ratification process something far more complicated than a referendum
on equal rights for women.” Ix
• “With respect to the ERA, for example, why did women oppose a measure designed to benefit women? The question,
however, should not be taken to imply that our work is designed merely as an explanation of why ERA failed; it failed
essentially because of timing and the fact that a constitutional amendment requires not only a two-thirds majority in each
house of Congress but also a majority vote of over 50 percent (three-fifths in Illinois) in the legislatures of three-fourths of
the states. Ratification of the amendment would not have changed the value of our study because the book is not about
political calculation, but about meaning.” X
• “the ERA controversy was over exactly what opponent women said was—sex. And sex meant something much broader and
more complicated than physical distinctiveness.” Xi
• “The perception on the part of anti-ERA women that proponents had repudiate womanhood in order to be men was born of
the former’s commitment to traditional obligations defined at birth (i.e. sex) that the believed to be part of the essential order
of creation. We soon learned that we were dealing with two different ways of understanding the universe. One was
comfortable with modern social analysis and challenges to tradition; the other believed such critiques eroded the foundations
of self and community.” Xi
• “The issues were not Southern issues; the same arguments were used in Massachusetts…” xi
• “But we are ultimately not trying to explain why ERA failed so much as what the debate surrounding the issue tells us about
the women’s movement and its place in this country during the 1970s.” xi
• “What at first glance appears to have been a legislative battle over ratification of a constitutional amendment emerges as
something more. It was more than community conflict in which political decisions were made simply to avoid increasingly
rancorous debate. It was more than symbolic conflict in which groups jockeyed for the legitimation conferred by having their
own values inscribed in the Constitution—although it was most certainly that, too.” Xii
•
25
“By 1976, the “ERA had become linked in the public mind with feminism, abortion, civil rights, secularism, and
nontraditional gender roles,” all carrying negative connotations (92)” Debusk Precis
• “The difference between the perceptions of the two sides is radical, reflecting their different worldviews. For instance, where
proponents of the ERA saw equal rights for education, jobs, and military service to be beneficial to all women, opponents of
the amendment negatively identified these concepts with a denouncement of family, maternity, femininity, and the woman’s
role within the private sphere. (131-32)” Debusk Precis
• “Opponents viewed feminists as allowing men to shirk their familial duties by pushing women to accept “the draft, and jobs,
and careers; to assume the support of their children; to keep their own names and to do “everything that men refused to do”
(172)” Debusk Precis
• “Most importantly, opponents felt as if proponents were aksing them to give up being women and all benefits that came with
femaleness. In other words, if women became truly equal in society, they could no longer rely on ‘women’s work’ and legal
protection. They would instead be called upon to be ‘men,’ giving up maternity leave, the right to stay home from war, the
ability to raise their children at home, and working conditions favorable to their physical strength and family obligations.” DP
• “For proponents, support of the ERA revolved around the facts (i.e. benefits for women); for opponents, it was an ideological
war to preserve traditional gender roles.” DP
Sources: North Carolina Congressional Records, Samuel James Ervin Jr. papers, oral histories
Connections: Rosen, World, Cott, Grounding, Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, Cohen, Consumer’s, Douglas, Where the Girls, May,
Homeward, Lemann, Promised, Kerber, No Constitutional, Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, Sanchez, Becoming,
•
Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994)
Argument: “Those who regard much of the 1960s pop culture as sexist trash, and who remember all too well how the network news
dismissively convered the women’s movement in the 1970s, may be loath to regard the mass media as agents of feminism. But here’s
the contradiction we confront: the news media, TV shows, magazines, and films of the past four decades may have turned feminism
into a dirty word, but they also made feminism inevitable.” 10
• “Unlike popular culture featuring boys, the major impact of kitsch for girls was supposedly reactionary, not subversive: it
urged us to be as domestic as June Cleaver, as buxom and dumb as Elly May Clampett, and as removed from politics as Lily
Munster. There is a crucial contradiction here: baby boom culture for girls didn’t matter at all, yet it mattered very much. It
was laughable and historically insignificant, but at the same time, it was a dangerous and all too powerful enforcer of
suffocating sex-role stereotypes. What’s more, neither of these premises helps explain the rise, and persistence, of one of the
most important social revolutions since World War II: the women’s liberation movement.” 6
• “For somehow, millions of girls went from singing “I Want to Be Bobby’s Girl” to changing “I am Woman (Hear Me Roar).”
Girls like me, who gorged ourselves on all these pop culture pastries, evolved from cheerleaders, experts at the Bristol stomp,
and Seventeen magazine junkies to women impatient with our continued second-class status, committed to equality and
change, and determined to hold our own in a man’s world.” 6-7
• The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped make me a feminist, and it helped make millions of other
women feminists too, whether they take on that label or not…The moment the women’s movement emerged in 1970,
feminism once again became a dirty word, with considerable help from the mainstream news media. News reports and
opinion columnists created a new stereotype, of fanatics, “bralees bubbleheads,” Amazons, “the angries,” and “a band of wild
lesbians.” 7
• “In a variety of ways the mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet
submit to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman should be. Our collective history of interacting with
and being shaped by the mass media has engendered in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis. We are ambivalent
toward femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other.” 8
• “To explain this schizophrenia, we must reject the notion that popular culture for girls and women didn’t matter, or that it
consisted only of retrograde images. American women today are a bundle of contradictions because much of the media
imagery we grew up with was itself filled with mixed messages about what women should and should not do, what women
could and could not be…The media, of course, urged us to be pliant, cute, sexually available, thin, blond, poreless, wrinklefree, and deferential to men. But it is easy to forget that the media also suggested we could be rebellious…” 9
• “The mass consumption of culture, the ways in which the shards got reassembled, actually encouraged many of us to
embrace feminism in some form. For throughout this process, we have found ourselves pinioned between two voices, one
insisting we were equal, the other insisting that we were subordinate. After a while, the tension became unbearable, and
millions of women found they were no longer willing to tolerate the gap between the promises of equality and the reality of
inequality.” 10
• “Like millions of girls of my generation, I was told I was a member of a new, privileged generation whose destiny was more
open and exciting than my parents. But, at the exact same time, I was told that I couldn’t really expect much more than to
end up like my mother.” 25
• “But her [Marilyn Monroe] suicide did represent the death of a certain kind of femininity, and a certain kind of female
victimization. When she died, it seemed to me, even back then, that an era had passed, and that the seemingly dumb-blond,
busty bombshell would no longer exert the cultural or sexual pull that she once did.” 42
26
“No wonder so many of our mothers were pissed. They worked all the time with little or no acknowledgement, while their
ingrate kids watched TV shows that insisted that good mothers, like true princesses, never complained, smiled a real lot, were
constantly good-natured, and never expected anything form anyone.” 44
• “Born in the 1920s and ‘30s, our mothers had been whipsawed first by the Depression, then by World War II, and finally by
the postwar recovery, each of which was accompanied by dramatically different cultural messages about proper female
behavior, messages with all the subtly of a sledgehammer.” 45
• “In the 1930s the message to women had been “Don’t steal a job from a man,” and twenty-six states had laws prohibiting the
employment of married women. Single, white women could find work as salesgirls, beauticians, schoolteachers, secretaries,
and nurses; women of color were much more restricted, consigned to jobs like maid, cook, and laundress. Although over
three-fourths of the women who worked did it because they had to, the common wisdom was that most women worked for a
more frivolous reason—because they wanted something called “pin money.” 45-46
• “By the end of the war, most of these women had discovered that they liked working outside the home—they liked the
money, the sense of purpose, the autonomy. Polls showed that 80 percent wanted to continue working after the war. Women
also wanted to be reunited with their husbands or sweethearts, and they wanted to start families. This was a very real desire,
but they didn’t want to give up everything for it.” 46-47
• “But there was an ideological component as well, stemming form the postwar hysteria over Communism. If the United
States was going to fight off contamination from this scourge—and the disease/infestation metaphor was rampant—then our
women had to be very different from their women. Their women worked in masculine jobs and had their kids raised outside
the home in state-run child-care centers that brainwashed kids to become good little comrades. Therefore, our kids had to be
raised at home by their moms if we were going to remain democratic and free. There actually were politicians and
newspapers that proclaimed day care a “Communist plot.”” 47
• “On September 7, 1968, Robin Morgan…organized several busloads of women to attend the annual Miss America pageant in
Atlantic City. What these women did there was, by the standards of the day, completely shocking. They were not there to
attend the pageant and choose who was prettier or had a better butt; they were there to put down the pageant, and put it down
they did…This was a completely outrageous event and marked a watershed in American history, a watershed virtually
ignored in retrospectives on the 1960s in general and 1968 in particular.” 139-140
• ““Women Versus Women” was how the debate over the ERA was headlined in news articles, TV shows, interviews, and
documentaries. All the news media’s initial responses to the women’s movement—the demonizing of feminists as out of the
mainstream, the exaggeration of the movement’s internal divisions, the erasure of male opposition to feminism—became
even more pronounced during the coverage of the ERA…Focusing on leaders implied that not all women shared the same
talents or the same plight—some were more, or less, equal than others.” 226
• “[Phyllis] Schafly headed a highly effective grass-roots organizing project that quickly developed enormous political clout.
Congress had finally passed the Equal Rights Amendment in March 1972, and within a year twenty-eight states had approved
the new amendment: ratification seemed a foregone conclusion. But then the tide turned, and as early as 1973 the ERA was
in trouble. By 1975, thirty-four states had ratified the ERA, but after that date only one more state voted yes (Indiana in
1977), and several states that had passed the amendment voted to rescind approval. After a ten-year fight to the finish, the
ERA died in July 1982, only three states shy of the number required for ratification. Schlafly achieved this victory, in part
because she was brilliant at exploiting media routines, biases, and stereotypes to make the ERA seem both dangerous and
unnecessary. She became a media celebrity, and the media became her most powerful weapon.” 233
• “Most of all, [Schafly] she appreciated that by organizing women to oppose the ERA, she automatically gave men, who held
the overwhelming majorities in every state legislature in the country, permission to oppose women’s liberation without
looking like sexist pigs. Phyllis Schlafly knew she couldn’t lose once she transformed the ERA from a struggle between
women and a male-dominated political system into a catfight between the girls.” 233
Sources: mass media, music, TV shows, newspapers, news programs, pamphlets
Connection: Rosen, World, Cott, Grounding, Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver, Cohen, Consumer’s, May, Homeward, de Hart and
Mathews, Sex, Gender, Lemann, Promised, Kerber, No Constitutional, Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors, Sanchez, Becoming
•
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000)
Argument: “Cold War Civil Rights traces the emergence, the development, and the decline of Cold War foreign affairs as a factor in
influencing civil rights policy by setting a U.S. history topic within the context of Cold War history.” 17
• “As presidents and secretaries of state from 1946 to the mid-1960s worried about the impact of race discrimination on U.S.
prestige abroad, civil rights reform came to be seen as crucial to U.S. foreign relations.” 6
• “As Wendell L. Willkie put it,” Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequalities selfevident. When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear
they can no longer be ignored.” 7
• “the impact of American racism on the war effort were played out in Axis propaganda. Pearl Buck reported that “Japan…is
declaring in the Philippines, in China, in India, Malaya, and even Russia that there is no basis for hope that colored peoples
can expect any justice” from the U.S. government.” 8
•
“Civil rights groups capitalized on the nation’s new focus on equality, and World War II spurred civil rights activism. The
NAACP developed, for the first time, a mass membership base.” 9
27
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“By 1947, the Cold War came to dominate the American political scene. As the Truman administration cast Cold War
international politics in apocalyptic terms, “McCarthyism” took hold in domestic politics. If communism was such a serious
threat world-wide, the existence of communists within the United States seemed particularly frightening. As the nation
closed ranks, critics of American society often found themselves labeled as “subversive.” Civil rights groups had to walk a
fine line, making it clear that their reform efforts were meant to fill out the contours of American democracy, and not to
challenge or undermine it.” 11
“Civil rights activists who sought to use international pressure to encourage reform in the United States also found
themselves under increasing scrutiny…This new international forum, dedicated to human rights, might pressure the U.S.
government to protect the rights of African Americans. However, to criticize the nation before an international audience and
to air the nation’s dirty laundry overseas was to reinforce the negative impact of American racism on the nation’s standing as
a world leader. It was seen, therefore, as a great breach of loyalty.” 11-12
“In addressing civil rights reform form 1946 through them mid-1960s, the federal government engaged in a sustained effort
to tell a particular story about race and American democracy; a story of progress, a story of the triumph of good over evil, a
story of U.S. moral superiority. The lesson of this story was always that American democracy was a form of government that
made the achievement of social justice possible, and that democratic change, however slow and gradual, was superior to
dictatorial imposition. The story of race in America, used to compare democracy and communism, became an important
Cold War narrative.” 13
“In 1965 the most liberal administration in American history—Lyndon Johnson’s—led the United States into a full-blown
war in Vietnam, pushing the limits of Cold War containment farther than any administration before (or after, as things turned
out). By 1975 liberals had long since abandoned Vietnam, and they were in full flight from containment and anything that
smacked of what now seemed that nasty old Cold War…Led by recent recruits to the conservative cause—the so-called
neoconservatives—they decried détente, Richard Nixon’s de-escalation of the Cold War, and beat the drums for a revival of
the armed struggle against communism.” 298, Brands
“Solidarity at home was essential; hence Harry Truman’s loyalty probes, Joseph McCarthy’s search for communists, and the
executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.” 298, Brands
“Typically the realm of government contracted after each war, although, political friction being what it is, rarely quite back to
its prewar level. The expected contraction commenced after World War II, but the outbreak of the Cold War halted it, then
reversed it. In essence, throughout the 1950s and 1960s the country remained on a permanent war footing. As they had
during earlier wars, so during the Cold War Americans looked to government to defend them; and as they had during earlier
wars, they gave government great benefit of the doubt in defining what the national defense required.” 299, Brands
“The struggle for the hearts and minds of the peoples of what was coming to be called the Third World assumed an
importance that rivaled the military-strategic contest between the American and Soviet alliance systems. This last aspect of
the Cold War forms the heart of Mary L. Dudziak’s story. Dudziack traces the connection between the struggle for racial
equality in America and the contest between the United States and its communist rivals overseas. Her story starts with the
murders of four African Americans in Georgia in the summer of 1946…[these murders] might have gone unnoticed against a
history of violence toward southern blacks, except that one of those killed was a recently discharged Army veteran. The fact
that George Dorsey had survived the war against fascism only to be felled by domestic racism struck many in America and
overseas as intolerable.” 299-300, Brands
“The blot grew bigger as black soldiers, many of whom had lost the habits of deference that long allowed African Americans
to avoid vigilante violence, returned home. Lynchings mounted, as did the international attention they drew. Dudziak
demonstrates that whatever else they yield historians, the files of the Department of State and the United States Information
Agency offer a window on the world essential unobtainable otherwise.” 300, Brands
“In his March 1947 speech unveiling the Truman Doctrine, Harry Truman asserted that the peoples of the world had to
choose between two ways of life, one modeled on America’s, the other on Russia’s. With every lynching of an American of
color that made international headlines—and at times it seemed that every lynching did make international headlines—
choosing the American way came harder to the hundreds of millions of people of color in other countries.” 300, Brands
“As a result, even a president as indifferent to racial equality per se as Dwight Eisenhower was driven to use the strongest
means to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board decision outlawing school segregation. What triggered Eisenhower’s action was
the international hammering the United States took when Arkansas governor Orval Faubus encouraged riots in Little Rock
against the integration of that city’s Central High School.” 300, Brands
“On travels to America, black African diplomats often suffered the same indignities as American blacks. Secretary of State
Dean Rusk recalled how this frustrated American policy: “A black delegate to the United States landed in Miami on his way
to New York. When passengers disembarked for lunch, the white passengers were taken to the airport restaurant; the black
delegate received a folding canvas stool in the corner of the hangar and a sandwich wrapped with waxed paper. He then flew
on to New York, where our delegate asked for his vote on human rights issues.” (167).” 301, Brands
“Yet like Eisenhower, Kennedy required a crisis to push civil rights to the tope of his political agenda. In 1963 Alabama
governor George Wallace blacked integration of the University of Alabama, promising “Segregation now! Segregation
tomorrow! Segregation forever!” By this time television spanned the world, and the images of Wallace in the schoolhouse
door damned America in the eyes of much of the world. Kennedy responded by calling for sweeping civil rights legislation,
and like Eisenhower, he linked reform in America to American security abroad.” 301, Brands
28
“Lyndon Johnson didn’t require the Cold War to sensitize him to the race issue; more than any president before or since,
Johnson perceived civil rights as a compelling moral issue. Not long after Kennedy’s death, Johnson told segregationist
senator Richard Russell of Georgia not to oppose him on civil rights.” 301-302, Brands
• “The same national-security arguments that brought Eisenhower and Kennedy around to civil rights helped Johnson fashion
the majorities that approved the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.” 302, Brands
• “During the Cold War, the imperatives of national security seemed to require efforts by government to solve all manner of
problems heretofore left to the private sector or the states. As long as the Cold War went well for America—as it did, in
general terms, until the late 1960s—Americans were willing to give government great latitude, as they historically had during
wartime. Johnson didn’t have to harp on the Cold War to support his civil rights initiatives. He could rely instead on the
legacy of deference to government that had built up since the late 1940s.” And Vietnam killed this deference and Watergate
did further damage to the government’s image. American liberalism was destroyed. 303, Brands
Sources: Department of State and Information Department’s newspapers
Connections: Gaddis, Origins of the Cold War, The Cold War, Lefebre, America, Russia, Payne, I’ve Got the Light, Chaffe, Civil
Rights, Rosen, World, Douglas, Where, May, Homeward, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic, Leuchtenberg, FDR, Schulman, The
Seventies, Brinkley, End, Kennedy, Over, Freedom from Fear, Takaki, Double, Dawley, Struggles, Dower, War, Goodman, Land,
Lemann, Promised, Litwack, Been
•
William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1980)
Argument: Greensboro represents a microcosm of North Carolina and its path towards integration. Important not only for its
supposedly progressive attitudes towards race relations, Greensboro was also home to the sit-in that started a mass wave of black
protest for civil rights across the country. In the end, Greensboro proved no more willing to integrate than many parts of the South.
• “In the late 1940’s, North Carolina had the lowest rate of unionization in the country. The state ranked forty-fifth in per
capita income, possessed one of the highest levels of illiteracy in the South, and placed almost last among the states in
average manufacturing wage…Even though the University was known throughout the country for its excellence, school
children in the state received less public support per pupil than in almost any other state. Thus, North Carolina represented a
paradox: it combined a reputation for enlightenment and a social reality that was reactionary. Greensboro was a microcosm
of the state at large.” 5
• “Appropriately, the story of civil rights in Greensboro from 1945 to 1975 embodies the paradox that lies at the heart of North
Carolina’s history. In 1954 Greensboro became the first city in the South to announce that it would comply with the Supreme
Court’s ruling, in Brown v Board of Education, that segregation in the schools must end. Six years later the city was the
birthplace of the sit-in movement—an act of protest that would help to transform the nation. By 1963 the number of people
demonstrating in Greensboro’s streets exceeded that in any city except Birmingham, and a young Greensboro black named
Jesse Jackson had begun his rapid rise to the leadership in the civil rights ranks. Six years after that, armed confrontation
between National Guard troops and black college students accompanied Greensboro’s emergence as a center of the Black
Power movement in the Southeast. Finally, in 1971—seventeen years after the Brown decision—Greensboro integrated its
public schools, becoming one of the last cities in the South to comply with federal desegregation order.” 6
• “Greensboro prided itself on being cosmopolitan—a place where progressive attitudes were a hallmark of political discourse
and where the “good life” of affluence and cultural sophistication was available to large numbers of people.” 13
• “The relatively better economic opportunities of black Greensboro severed as a double-edged sword, attracting ambitious
black recruits to the town but also generating anger at the persistence of white oppression.” 18
• “It was the black colleges in Greensboro, however, that most exemplified the pride and hope of the [black] community.” 20
• “In fact, two different styles of leadership existed side by side in black Greensboro. One was willing to challenge directly the
oppressiveness of white power; the other sought to work within the structures of white power for black advancement.” 21
• “As elsewhere, World War II brought an acceleration of black political and protest activity.” In 1951 a black is elected to the
city council causing widespread optimism in the black community.” 25-28
• Greensboro was one of the first to vote to integrate schools, but one of the last cities to integrate. The problem was that many
of the white board of education members voted for desegregation but did not establish a firm timeline—many wanted it slow.
• “The [NC Governor’s] advisory committee recommended passage of a Pupil Assignment Act removing control over
education from the state and returning it to local school boards. The purpose of the change…was “to be sure that the state is
not involved in any state-wide [desegregation] suit” by the NAACP or others. More importantly, the pupil assignment bill
established multiple criteria such as residence, previous schools attended, and other “local conditions” that could serve as the
basis for perpetuating segregation without mentioning race.” 50
• Later, “the Pearsall Plan—a local-option clause permitting a school district, or any portion thereof, to close its schools by
public referendum if desegregation occurred, and a constitutional amendment granting state tuition aid for white students in
those districts to attend private schools…Ingeniously, the Pearsall Plan thus became a progressive alternative to extremism.”
• “In the end the Pearsall Plan accomplished all the objectives its sponsors had envisioned. It postponed meaningful
desegregation in North Carolina for more than a decade—longer than in some states where massive resistance was
practiced.” 60
• “In the end, therefore, North Carolina’s progressivism consisted primarily of its shrewdness in opposing racial change. The
state’s leaders failed to broaden the beachhead that the Brown decision had established. Instead, with the Pearsall Plan as its
29
instrument and token desegregation in places like Greensboro as primary defense [they integrated 6 kids], North Carolina
set out to forestall integration.” 70
• “Within a year, more than one hundred cities had engaged in at least some desegregation of public facilities in response to
student-led demonstrations. The 1960’s stage of the freedom movement had begun. The Greensboro sit-ins constituted a
watershed in the history of America. Although similar demonstrations had occurred before, never in the past had they
prompted such a volcanic response.” 71
• After 5 months of demonstrations the lunch counters were open. After that protests and sit-ins occurred at other Greensboro
segregated dining facilities and stores.
Sources: newspapers, government records, oral histories
Connections: D’Emilio, Last Prophet, Payne, I’ve Got the Light, Takaki, Double, Dower, War Without Mercy, Dudziak, Cold War
Civil Rights, Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Litwack, Been, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic, Oropeza, Guerra, Sanchez, Walls,
Guttierrez, Becoming
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995)
Argument: “Payne’s narrative structure embodies the thesis of his book that the Mississippi movement was a movement of the
people.” 626, Dudziak
• “In part, this book is an examination of that campaign. How was it possible, within a few years, to move large numbers of
dependent and, to all appearances, apolitical people—none of them having any semblance of legal rights at the local level, all
of them vulnerable to violence—how was it possible to move these people to a position of actively working to change the
conditions of their own lives?” 2
• “There was what he labels the community-mobilizing tradition, focused on large-scale, relatively short-term public events.
This is the tradition of Brimigham, Selma, the March on Washington, the tradition bets symbolized by the work of Martin
Luther King [and Bayard Rustin]. This is the movement of popular memory and the only part of the movement that has
attracted sustained scholarly attention.” 3
• “The Mississippi movement reflects another tradition of Black activism, one of community organizing, a tradition with a
different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in
ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized, [Bob] Moses argues, by the teaching example of Ella Baker—and, I
would add, by that of Septima Clark. That tradition, and placing the history of Grenwood within it, is the second major
theme of this book.” 3-4
• “Chapters 1 through 3 argue that in fact the initiative that made change possible was far more widely dispersed in Black
communities than we ordinarily realize.” 4
• “Between the end of Reconstruction and the modern civil rights era, Mississippi lynched 539 Blacks, more than any other
state. Between 1930 and 1950—during the two decades immediately preceding the modern phase of the civil rights
movement—the state had at least 33 lynchings.” 7
• “Negro veterans played an important role in the change. Like their predecessors from the First World War, some of them
returned to the South with a new sense of the proper order of things. All across the South Negro veterans tried to register [to
vote] an protested attempts to keep them from doing so.” 24
• “After [Senator Theodore] Bilbo’s reelection in 1946, the national NAACP, in conjunction with organized labor and other
groups Bilbo had offended, led a drive to convince the Senate to refuse to seat him, on the grounds that Biblo had been a
leader in the disenfranchisement of Blacks. At the hearing held in Jackson, Black veterans testified for three days.
Moreover, Negroes packed the courtroom, perhaps the most significant act of public defiance from Negroes the state had
seen in decades.” 24-25
• “Characteristically, Mississippi made less progress between the late forties and the early fifties than did nearby states. In that
period, Mississippi saw a fourfold increase in Black registration.” 25
• “A part of the appeal of the Regional Council [of Negro Leadership] was its stress on economic issues, an area the NAACP
was frequently criticized for underemphasizing…It was seen as being too committed to producing change through litigation
to allow local leaders much initiative.” 32-33
• “The developers of the community organizing tradition [Ella Jo Baker, Septima Clark] focused on the education of women
and young people. As passing an extensive written test was required in order to vote in many states, organizers concentrated
on raising the literacy rate of the African American community in the South. The community organizers hoped to use “the
vote as a collective tool” (135). By utilizing the community as a collective, the organizers took the emphasis off the
individual and placed it on the group. This tactic turned the “ordinary people” into heroes.” Butler Precis
• “Payne contests the popular notion hat African American churches were central to the Civil Rights movement; African
American churches, according to Payne, entered the arena of Civil Rights late in the game, and somewhat reluctantly. Payne
contends that the African American churches resisted involvement in the Civil Rights movement because of the charitable
donations they received from white patrons.” Butler Precis
• “Though the African American churches finally embraced their position in the Civil Rights movement, eventually the
grassroots works, such as the community organizing of Ella Jo Baker, Septima Clark, Myles Horton, and Bob Moses, fell into
decline. With the lack of organizing came the decreased attention in the media, which, thereby led to a lessened watchfulness
by the academic community.” Butler Precis
Sources: oral histories, newspapers, organizational records
30
Connections: Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, D’Emilio, Last Prophet, Goodman, Land,
Lemann, Promised, Takaki, Double, Dower, War Without Mercy, Litwack, Been, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic, Oropeza, Guerra,
Sanchez, Walls, Guttierrez, Becoming
Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991)
Argument: “By offering a detailed rendering of the conflict, [Young] she hopes to show that “in the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
progress of the war lay many of its most decisive reasons and irrationalities” (x). Her general appraisal of the evidence states that
“there was no conceivable justification for the horrors daily inflicted on and suffered in Vietnam” (ix).” Costanzo Précis
• “Young’s treatment of the history of Vietnam can be divided into three general sections. The first begins in the twilight of
the Second World War and concludes with the death of President Kennedy…after supporting France in their losing effort to
retain the colony, U.S. policy in the wake of the armistice which divided Vietnam relied upon the puppet government
installed in the South...Young describes the Kennedy administration as primarily concerned with “how the war looked at
home and abroad” (92). In addition, she notes that they used Vietnam “as a laboratory for counterinsurgency techniques and
weapons” (82).” Costanzo Precis
• “The next [second] third of the book deals with the Johnson administration’s escalation of the war. Young explains that, after
gaining a free hand from Congress by grossly exaggerating the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson faced three options for
handling Vietnam: bombing the North, intensifying the war in the South and attempting to pacify the countryside. LBJ chose
to attempt all three simultaneously. In addition, Johnson determined that the war would be fought “on the side,” without
requesting a tax increase or declaration of war from Congress (160).” Costanzo Precis
• “Of the conclusion of the war, she states that “The Nixon administration had it both ways: the illusion of peace, the reality of
ongoing war” since bombing continued in Cambodia and Laos (277). Young concludes the book with a review of US foreign
policy and international intervention from the end of the war through 1990. She detects little change in what she sees as the
basic tenet of Cold War policy, that “change not sponsored or sanctioned by the United States or its agents” is treated as a
threat (317).” Costanzo Precis
• “At first we were in Vietnam for the sake of stability in France, which held the American plan for European security and
recovery hostage to its colonial war in Indochina. We were also there to provide Japan with Southeast Asian substitutes for
the China trade the United States had embargoed. In the largest sense, the United States was in Vietnam as a crucial part of
the enterprise of reorganizing the post-World War II world according to the principles of liberal capitalism.” Ix
• “Paralleling the development of the question “Why are we in Vietnam?” from inquiring about motives to denouncing the acts
of war, I have come to believe that in the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly progress of the war lay many of its most decisive
reasons and irrationalities.” Ix-x
• “war continues to be a primary instrument of American foreign policy and the call to arms a first response to international
disputes.” X
• “Those who fought the war and died in it were disproportionately poor, badly educated, and black. (A high school dropout
who enlisted had a 70 percent chance of being sent to Vietnam, a college graduate only 42 percent; until 1971, student
deferments protected the majority of students from the draft altogether.)” 319
• “Between 1966 and 1972, a special Great Society program—Project 100,000—scooped up over 300,000 young men
previously considered ineligible for the military because of their low test scores. Project 100,000, Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara declared, was the “world’s largest education of skilled men.” With lower admissions scores, the
“subterranean poor” would have an opportunity to serve their country in Vietnam; simultaneously, the program had the
advantage of avoiding the politically unpleasant alternative of requiring students or reservists to do the same. The benefits,
especially to young black men, were said to be especially striking. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out, the military was
“an utterly masculine world. Given the strains of disordered and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth came
of age, the armed forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change, a world away from women, a world run by strong
men and unquestioned authority, where discipline, if harsh, is nonetheless orderly and predictable, and where rewards, if
limited, are granted on the basis of performance.” In its first two years of operation, 41 percent of those brought in to the
military through Project 100,000 were black, 80 percent had dropped out of high school, 40 percent could read at less than
sixth-grade level, and 37 percent were put directly into combat. Court-martialed at double the usual rate, over eighty
thousand of those veterans left the military without the skills and opportunities McNamara assured them would be theirs, and
many of them with service records that would make civilian life far more difficult than if they had never served at all.” 320
• “The war gave many women responsibilities and a sense of power usually denied them in civilian life. But this new status
too was confusing and even dehumanization that were its occasion.” 323
• “In 1982, the Veterans Administration acknowledged that women were truly Vietnam vets: for the first time groups were
established for women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.” 323
Sources: secondary sources, newspapers, oral histories, government records
Connections: Appy, Patriots, Herring, America’s Longest War, Gaddis, Origins, New Cold War, Lefabre, America, Russia
George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 Fourth Edition (2002)
Argument: “I have attempted to explain American decision making on Vietnam in the broader context of the nation’s domestic
politics and especially of its global outlook and foreign policies for the quarter century between 1950 and 1975. Fear of the domestic
political consequences of “losing” Vietnam haunted American policymakers from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon. More important, I
31
think, U.S involvement in Vietnam was a logical, if not inevitable, outgrowth of a world view and a policy—the policy of
containment—that Americans in and out of government accepted without serious question for more than two decades. The
commitment in Vietnam expanded as the containment policy itself grew. In time, it outlived the conditions that had given rise to that
policy. America’s failure in Vietnam called into question some of the basic premises of that policy and provoked a searching
reappraisal of American attitudes toward the world and their place in it.” xiii
• “This is not primarily a military history. Rather, in keeping with the purpose of the “America in Crisis” series, it seeks to
integrate military, diplomatic, and political factors in such a way as to explain America’s involvement and ultimate failure in
Vietnam. My focus is on the United States, but I have sought to provide sufficient analysis of the Vietnamese side to make
these events comprehensible. I have attempted to show the important role played by other nations such as the Soviet Union
and China in the origins and outcome of the war.” xii
• “I believe now, as I did then, that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was misguided. It can be argued that the containment policy
worked in Europe, contributing significantly, perhaps even decisively, to the outcome of the Cold War. This said, I still
believe that containment was misapplied in Vietnam. Obsessed with their determination to stop the advance of communism,
abysmally ignorant of the Vietnamese people and their history, Americans profoundly misread the nature of the struggle in
Vietnam, its significance for their national interests, and its susceptibility to their power.” Xiii-xiv
• “After the Korean War, however, United States leaders discarded this view [that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist but
primarily a nationalist], seeing Vietnam’s struggle for independence as part of the Chinese scheme of expansion, and gave
all-out help to France in her colonial war. Later, the events at the Bay of Pigs and in Berlin might have further spurred the
United States to stand firm in South Vietnam, but the view of all of the socialist countries as a monolithic force, led by the
Soviet Union and China and bent on expansion, was the main element behind the blind anticommunism of the United States
vis-à-vis Vietnam. This view distorted United States foreign policy and turned a country that is tangential to its national
security into a strategy and ordnance focus.” 1464, Huynh
• “Herring…believed that presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson often chose the “middle ground” in making
decisions.” 1465, Huynh
Sources: government records, secondary sources
Connections: Appy, Patriots, Young, The Vietnam Wars, Gaddis, Origins, New Cold War, Lefabre, America, Russia
David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (1995)
Argument: “Gutierrez argues that the influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States reconfigures Mexican Americans’ notions
of identity and community.” 230, Chavez
• “In the three decades since 1960 the growth of the United States’ Hispanic, or Latino, population has become an increasingly
controversial issue. Increasing at a rate that far exceeds that of any other minority group, the number of Americans of Latino
descent rose from just under 7 million persons in 1960 to approximately 10.5 million in 1970, 14.6 million in 1980, and an
estimated 20 million in 1990.” 1
• “Although Mexican Americans and, more recently other U.S. Latinos have been among those most directly affected by
sustained immigration from Mexico and Latin America, relatively little is known about how they have reacted to the steady
influx of immigrants into their communities over the course of this century. There are probably many explanations for the
relative dearth of knowledge about this question, but I would argue that one of the primary reasons researchers have not
pursued the issue is that until fairly recently few Americans have recognized much of a distinction between long-term U.S
residents of Mexican and Latin descent and more recent immigrants form Mexico and other nations of Latin America.” 2
• “By focusing on the historical origins and evolution of Mexican Americans’ views about Mexican immigrants, I hoped
eventually to shed light on what appeared to me to be an intriguing contradiction. My belief was that by exploring the
differences that divided and the commonalities that bound the two groups—the walls and mirrors that so clearly characterized
their relationship in the United States—I could illuminate some puzzling, unexplored dimensions of Mexican American
political and social history, of the processes involved in immigrant settlement and adaptation, and of the larger national
debate over immigration policy toward Mexico.” 4
• “One end of the spectrum of opinion has been occupied by those Mexican Americans who tend to view Mexican immigrants
as a threat…they believe that unrestricted immigration has undermined Mexican Americans’ life chances by increasing
economic competition and contributing to the reinforcement of negative racial and cultural stereotypes held by white
Americans…Logically, Mexican Americans who subscribe to this set of assumptions have also tended to argue that
immigration from Mexico should be tightly controlled.” 4-5
• “Seeing themselves reflected in the people they call los recien llegados (recent arrivals), Mexican Americans occupying this
end of the spectrum of opinion have tended to express more empathy for immigrants from Mexico…this sympathetic point of
view stems from belief that the affinities between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants based on ties of culture,
kinship, and friendship are much more important than any differences that divide them… Noting that Americans seem to
discriminate against Mexicans whether they are U.S. citizens or not, Mexican Americans oriented in this way can see little
difference between their position in American society and that of more recent immigrants.” 5
• “On February 2, 1848…the Treaty of Guadalupe hidalgo [was signed]…With most of the terms dictated by the victorious
Americans, the treaty established a new border between the two nations, provided official recognition of the United States’
previous annexation of Texas, and provided for the payment by the United States of 15 million dollars to Mexico in exchange
for Mexico’s former northern provinces.” 13
32
“By the turn of the century most Mexican Americans found themselves in a position in society not much better than that
occupied by Indians and African Americans elsewhere in the Untied States. Over the course of the nineteenth century,
however, these hardships played an important countervailing role by laying the foundation for the eventual emergence of a
new sense of solidarity among Mexican Americans in the Southwest.” 14
• “In technical, political terms, although Mexican Americans, by virtue of their new status as American citizens, were no
longer Mexicans, American racism and Mexican Americans’ de facto subordinate status in the new social order encouraged
them to consider themselves Mexicans in a way they never had before.” 37
• “In developing a new sense of community based both on a common Mexican cultural heritage and the common experience of
racial prejudice in the United States, Mexican Americans were able to transform Anglo Americans’ efforts to stigmatize them
as racial inferiors into a positive strategy of self-affirmation as Mexicans in American society. At the same time, Mexican
Americans’ success in generating such new bases for solidarity went a long way toward guaranteeing the survival and growth
of a distinct, if syncretic, variant of Mexican culture in what had become part of the United States.” 37’
• “Forced to compete against the recent arrivals for scarce jobs, housing, and access to social services in a social and political
context in which Mexicans were already stigmatized, many Mexican Americans argued that large-scale immigration
represented a clear danger to ethnic Mexicans already living in the United States.” 66
• “Although few observers were aware of it at the time, the primary reason sustained Mexican immigration created tensions in
Mexican American communities was that immigration had strongly altered the context of social relationships in the region.
Before 1900 Mexican Americans had effectively utilized their sense of Meixcanness as a boundary-marking mechanism that
in many ways protected them from, or at least buffered, the prejudice and discrimination they experienced in American
society.
By maintaing elements of Hispanic-Meixcan culture and identifying themselves as Mexicanos, as
Hispanoamericanos, or as members of the more metaphysical La Raza, Mexican Americans had asserted an oppositional set
of defining characteristics that helped demarcate their community from Norteamericanos…The influx of large numbers of
immigrants from Mexico after the turn of the century upset this bifurcated social ordering by introducing a huge new set of
actors.” 66-67
• “Such activitists insisted that Americans in good conscience could not have it both ways—they could not simultaneously
exploit the labor and the goodwill of ethnic Mexican people, deny them any real possibility of assimilating into the social or
cultural mainstream, and then expect them not to continue to cherish and defend their own cultural traditions and practices.”
• “By the late 1970s internal debate among Mexican Americans and Chicanos over the most basic questions of ethnic and
cultural identity, the steadily increasing class, generational, and regional diversity of the population, and the fundamental
historical disagreements over the best political strategy for the United States’ ethnic Mexican minority combined to foil
concerted Mexican American-Chicano action.” 205
Sources: oral histories, organizational literature, newspapers, immigration debates and legislation
Connections: Oropeza, Raza Si, Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, Last Prophet,
Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Takaki, Double, Dower, War Without Mercy, Litwack, Been, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic,
Payne, I’ve, Foley, The White Scourge, Jacobson, Whiteness, Daniels, Guarding
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993)
Argument: “[Sanchez] he argues tat because Mexican migrants move between two countries, they have been the first to experience
the “postmodern condition.” Not only did Mexican immigrants live in a postmodern world, but by moving from one country to
another, they also had to invent new traditions and discard old customs in an effort to make sense of their new terrain. Ultimately,
Sanchez believes that ethnicity was “not a fixed set of customs surviving from Mexico, but rather a collective identity that emerged
from daily experience in the United States” (11).” 225-226, Chavez
• “David M. Potter…argued that because virtually all Americans descended from immigrants, they were compulsively
preoccupied with the question of national identity. Americans feel deprived of an organic connection to the past, especially
when confronted with their diverse religious, linguistic, and political heritage. The result has been an obsessive fixation on
the elusive tenets of “Americanism.” 4
•
“For example, the concept of a dual or segmented labor market has been used to explain the disadvantaged position of
Mexican workers in the Southwest. This structural approach argues that while those in the primary sector enjoy relatively
decent wages, labor conditions, job security, and union membership, those in the secondary sector, including racial minority
groups such as Mexicans, are relegated to low-paying, “dead-end” jobs.” 7
• “Recently, Chicano scholars in art, literature, and anthropology have begun to develop notions of “trans-creation” to describe
the process of cultural formation among Chicanos and other Latinos in the United States. The movement between Mexican
and American cultures is not so much a world of confusion, but rather a place of opportunity and innovation.” 9
• “Yet “Mexico,” maybe even more so than other nations, was a national community that had to be “imagined” to exist,
particularly given its racial and regional diversity. Not only was culture never static in Mexico, nor U.S. influence ever far
removed in shaping in contours, but the construction of a Mexican national identity was never more ferociously persuaded
than in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution—at the very moment thousands of Mexicans were making their way north.”
• “Thus, my own study necessarily begins with an examination of the rural villages and burgeoning towns of Mexico. Mexico
during the early twentieth century was undergoing fundamental socioeconomic upheaval. Partly because of this tumult,
hundreds of thousands of Mexicans crossed the border into the United States, usually seeking temporary residence and better
wages in order to help their families survive through difficult times…moving north signified a momentous occasion. Though
•
33
back-and-forth migration continued, increasingly durable settlement north of the border was a result of tightening
immigration restriction.” 9-10
• “The growth of the Chicano community in Los Angeles created a “problem” for Anglo American residents, one which
resulted in public efforts to alter cultural loyalties among Mexican immigrants. American officials launched programs to
teach these newcomers idealized versions of American practices, customs, and values. The Mexican government, for its part,
worked through its consulate office to instill loyalty to Mexico, trying to persuade citizens to return to their native country.
Neither of these efforts had their intended effect, but both ironically served to stimulate the process of self-recognition as
ethnic Americans among the immigrant population.” 10
•
“The struggle which forged a Mexican American identity was powerfully rooted in the decade of the 1930s. The onset of
the Great Depression forced many Chicano residents to reconsider their decision to remain in the United States. Moreover,
the deportation and repatriation campaigns launched against Mexicans in Los Angeles profoundly disrupted the cultural
centeredness of the community. Los Angeles lost one-third of its Mexicans residents, and those who remained were made
keenly aware of the fragility of their social position. The sons and daughters of the immigrant generation, entering adulthood
during the late 1930s and early 1940s, became acutely sensitive to America’s lack of tolerance. Hence, many became more
active in American unions and struggles for civil rights. They found themselves profoundly affected by a generation of labor
leaders, both Chicano and Anglo, who dedicated their lives to the fight for social equality in the era of the New Deal.” 12
• “This new cultural identity was forged within the context of a hostile, racist environment which sought to deny Mexican
Americans a claim to being “Americans.” The so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” in Los Angeles in 1943 were only the most
outward manifestation of the racism they experienced. As a result, parents and children alike forged an ambivalent
Americanism—one distinguished by a duality in cultural practices and a marked adaptability in the face of discrimination.”13
• “Central to my thesis is the argument that Mexican American cultural adaptation occurred without substantial economic
mobility, particularly since it was rooted in the context of the Great Depression. This book is in part a study of how cultural
change can take place without social mobility. Previous studies of Chicanos in Los Angeles have been helpful in
understanding the forces which militated against upward mobility among Mexican Americas. But, as we shall see, these
earlier works have neglected to tell the fascinating story of cultural invention which must also be included in any portrait of
working class life in these years.” 13
• “I argue that the emphasis in Chicano history on bipolar models that have stressed either cultural continuity or gradual
acculturation has short-circuited a full exploration of the complex process of cultural adaptation.” 13
• “Historical writing on immigration in the United States surely suffers from this severe regional imbalance; most studies still
focus on the Northeast and selected cities of the Old Northwest. The fact that the American Southwest has been the locus of
one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history is repeatedly overlooked.
• “Rarely did migration to the United States uproot all vestiges of one’s native culture, but neither did Mexican culture remain
unchanged in the United States. Rather, cultural adaptation occurred gradually, particularly among those who made conscious
decisions to remain north of the border. Though changes were evident in the values and practices of the immigrant
generation, a more profound adaptation usually occurred among their children.” 272
• “The million Mexican-origin residents of Los Angeles would appear to him to be no longer Mexican and yet not quite
American either, but suspended between two cultures. To this elite Mexican intellectual, the mostly working-class Mexican
American population appeared unable to ever truly be at home in their new homeland. Yet Mexican Americans themselves
did not necessarily concur. Most had no difficulty seeing themselves as both Mexican and American. They knew that they
had become cultural bridges between the two lands; in fact, they had created a new borderlands in the east-side barrios in
which cultural revival and re-creation were ever-present.” 272
• “The back-and-forth nature of Mexican migration throughout the twentieth century—with the exception of the 1930s—
insured the constant infusion of Mexican culture into Chicano communities in the United States. Moreover, it also
guaranteed that American culture would be brought deep into Mexico by returning migrants.” 272
• “Being witness to the repatriation of thousands of Mexicans early in the decade, Mexican American adolescents struggled to
find their identity on American soil without benefit of recent newcomers. As Americans, they attempted to take a middle
ground—searching for ways to reconcile their Mexican heritage with a new role as citizens of the United States.” 273
• “Most adaptation to American society occurred within the confines of the working class. During the 1920s, this meant that
Mexicans learned about American life in the ethnically mixed neighborhoods in central and east Los Angeles…During most
of the period from 1900 to 1945, however, Mexicans were integrated into American working-class life, living among other
ethnics also coming to terms with what it meant to be American.” 273
• “Neither Americanization nor Mexicanization programs succeeded in eliciting intended responses among immigrants in Los
Angeles. At best, these programs encouraged the creation of an identity as ethnic Americans among the Mexican immigrant
population. Economic, social, and cultural forces in the city and relations between the two nations had more influence on
motivating particular behavior or attitudes than organized governmental efforts.” 273
• “Indeed, it is possible to argue that Los Angeles provided Mexican immigrants more latitude than any other community in the
Southwest in shaping a Mexican American identity. Far enough away from the border to encourage experimentation with
new cultural influences, newcomers there were still close enough to the population centers of Mexico to receive constant
input from newly arrived immigrants.” 274
Sources: postmodern philosophy, mutalista literature, newspapers, Mexican Consulate records, municipal records
34
Connections: Oropeza, Raza Si, Gutierrez, Walls, Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, Last Prophet, Goodman, Land,
Lemann, Promised, Takaki, Double, Dower, War Without Mercy, Litwack, Been, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic, Payne, I’ve, Foley,
The White Scourge, Jacobson, Whiteness, Daniels, Guarding
Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Argument: “This book proposes to map the significance of the racial designations that have framed the history of European
immigration—white and Caucasian on the one hand, and narrower distinctions such as Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Hebrew, Slav, Alpine,
Mediterranean, or Nordic on the other—in order to make sense of pervasive racial articulations that scholars have too conveniently
passed over simply as misuses of the word “race.”” 6
• “Thus sexuality is one site at which all the economic advantages, political privileges, and social benefits inhering in a cultural
invention like Caucasian converge and reside.” 3
• “As races are invented categories—designations coined for the sake of grouping and separating peoples along lines of
presumed difference—Caucasians are made and not born. White privilege in various forms has been a constant in American
political culture since colonial times, but whiteness itself has been subject to all kinds of contests and has gone through a
series of historical vicissitudes.” 4
• “American scholarship on immigration has generally conflated race and color, and so has transported a late-twentieth-century
understanding of “difference” into a period whose inhabitants recognized biologically based “races” rather than culturally
based “ethnicities.” 6
• “Nonetheless, the history of whiteness in the United States is divisible into three great epochs. The nation’s first
naturalization law in 1790 (limiting naturalized citizenship to “free white persons”) demonstrates the republican convergence
of race and “fitness for self-government”; the law’s wording denotes an unconflicted view of the presumed character and
unambiguous boundaries of whiteness. Fifty years later, however, beginning with the massive influx of highly undesirable
but nonetheless “white” persons from Ireland, whiteness was subject to new interpretations. The period of mass European
immigration, from the 1840s to the restrictive legislation of 1924, witnessed a fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of
plural and scientifically determined white races.” 7
• “Finally, in the 1920s and after, partly because the crisis of over-inclusive whiteness had been solved by restrictive legislation
and partly in response to a new racial alchemy generated reconsolidated: the late nineteenth century’s probationary white
groups were now remade and granted the scientific stamp of authenticity as the unitary Caucasian race—an earlier era’s
Celts, Slavs, Hebrews, Iberics, and Saracens, among others, had become the Caucasians so familiar to our own visual
economy and racial lexicon.” 8
• “Two premises guide my approach to these questions. First, race is absolutely central to the history of European immigration
and settlement…The second premise guiding this work is that race resides not in nature but in politics and culture.” 8-9
• “Ultimately, I would argue, this treatment of the racial history of European immigration counters any facile comparisons of
the African-American experience with the white immigrant experience: it is not just that various white immigrant group’s
economic successes came at the expense of nonwhites, but that they owe their now stabilized and broadly recognized
whiteness itself in part to these nonwhite groups.” 9
• “And so this history of whiteness and its fluidity is very much a history of power and its disposition. But there is a second
dimension: race is not just a conception; it is also a perception…The American eye sees a certain person as black, for
instance, who Haitian or Brazilian eyes might see as white. Similarly, an earlier generation of Americans saw Celtic,
Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, or Mediterranean physiognomies where today we see only subtly varying shades of a mostly
undifferentiated whiteness.” 10
• “My narrative takes three separate tacks on the problem, each illuminating one particular dimension of race and its workings
in American culture: race as an organizer of power whose vicissitudes track power relationships through time; race as a mode
of perception contingent upon the circumstances of the moment; and race as the product of specific struggles for power at
specific cultural sites.” 11
• “The contending forces that have fashioned and refashioned whiteness in the United States across time, I argue, are
capitalism (with its insatiable appetite for cheap labor) and republicanism (with its imperative of responsible citizenship).
Citizenship was a racially inscribed concept at the outset of the new nation: by an act of Congress, only “free white”
immigrants could be naturalized.” 13
• “The period from the 1920s to the 1960s saw a dramatic decline in the perceived differences among these white Others.
Immigration restriction, along with internal black migrations, altered the nation’s racial alchemy and redrew the dominant
racial configuration along the strict, binary line of white and black, creating Caucasians where before had been so many
Celts, Hebrews, Teutons, Mediterraneans, and Slavs.” 14
• (It is worth recalling, in this connection, that the “wild Irish” and the violent colonization of Ireland had provided the
template for English understanding of North American savages and the course of North American colonization in the first
place.” 38
• “The limitation of naturalized citizenship to “free white persons” profoundly shaped Asian-American history, for instance. It
was this law, still in effect in the 1870s and 1880s, that denied Chinese immigrants the political might with which to
challenge the rising tides of exclusionism or to protect themselves against the violent white mobs…It was this law, still in
effect in 1942, that left Japanese immigrants so vulnerable to the wartime hysteria that would become a federal policy of
internment.” 39
35
“What is too easily missed from our vantage point, however, is the staggering inclusivity of the 1790 naturalization law.
IT was this law’s unquestioned use of the word “white” that allowed for the massive European migrants of the nineteenth
century, beginning with the Famine Migration from Ireland, and ultimately including the ‘48ers from Germany, the Italians,
Greeks, Poles, Rutheians, Slovenians, Magyars, Ukrainians, Lithuanians—none of whom the framers had even envisioned
swelling the polity of the new nation when they crafted its rules for naturalization.” 40
• “The main currents in this period (c. 1840s-1920s) included, first, a spectacular rate of industrialization in the United States,
whose voracious appetite for cheap labor—combined with political and economic dislocations across industrializing
Europe—brought unprecedented numbers of migrants to New World shores; second, a growing nativist perception of these
laborers themselves as a political threat to the smooth functioning of the republic; and third, consequently, a fracturing of
monolithic whiteness by the popular concerns over the newcomers’ “fitness for self-government.” 41
• “First, nativism was a response to the political crisis created by the 1790 naturalization law—the over-inclusivity of the
category “white persons.” Hence, second, the history of American nativisim from the 1840s to the 1920s is largely the
history of a fundamental revision of whiteness itself.” 68
• “Rather, the racialism expressed in simian caricatures, naturalistic novels, and acts of Congress are more fruitfully examined
within the broader pattern of race-bound notions of “fitness for self-government” that had characterized American political
cultural since the framers first plumbed the “utopian depths” of experimentation with republican government.” 68
• “Several circumstances conspired in the early and mid-twentieth century to heighten the premium on race as color and to
erode the once-salient “differences” among the white races. Not least, the triumph of the eugenics movement in making the
Johnson formula into law quickly reduced the threat posed by inferior white races to the body politic, and so decreased the
political and social stakes that had kept such distinctions alive. With this dramatic decrease in the flow of new arrivals,
moreover, the overall center of gravity of these immigrant populations shifted toward an American-born generation for whom
the racial oppressions of the Old World—if significant grist for the plaintive songs and heroic stories of a group’s
subculture—were far less significant than American white privilege where immediate racial experience was concerned.” 95
• “The massive migrations of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North and West between the 1910s and the
1940s, too, produced an entirely new racial alchemy in those sections. Mid-century civil rights agitation on the part of
African-Americans—and particularly the protest against segregation in the military and discrimination in the defense
industries around World War II—nationalized Jim Crow as the racial issue of American political discourse.” 95
• “The notion that Irishness, like other “ethnic” whitenesses, was a cultural trait rather than a visual racial cue became deeply
embedded in the nation’s political culture between the 1920s and the 1960s.” 96
• “The chapters of part two explore the fluidity of race by focusing upon a rather narrow slice of time, 1877, and upon a single
social group, Jews. The conflicting racial discourses in 1877 indicate the political character of race: civil strife over Negro
rights in the South, anti-Chinese agitation and Indian Wars in the West, labor agitation and violence in the Midwest and East,
reports of war in the Caucasus—each arena generated its own racial lexicon, invoked its own patterns of racial difference,
introduced its own racially inscribed dramatis personae.” 137
Sources: eugenics reports, newspapers, nativist literature
Connections: Oropeza, Raza Si, Gutierrez, Walls, Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, Last Prophet, Goodman, Land,
Lemann, Promised, Takaki, Double, Dower, War Without Mercy, Litwack, Been, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic, Payne, I’ve, Foley,
The White Scourge, Sanchez, Becoming, Daniels, Guarding
•
Neil Foley, The White Scourge:Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture
Argument: “I suggest that the scourge of the South and the nation was not cotton or poor whites but whiteness itself—whiteness not
simply as the pinnacle of ethnoracial status but as the complex social and economic matrix wherein racial power and privilege were
shared, not always equally, by those who were able to construct identities as Anglo-Saxons, Nordics, Caucasians, or simply whites.
Poor whites, always low-ranking members of the whiteness club, were banished in the early twentieth century on the grounds that they
were culturally and biologically inferior. The “wages of whiteness” conferred privilege on those who were able to claim whiteness, as
historian David Roediger has ably shown, but they also invoke the biblical injunction that the “wages of sin” is death—death to the
notion of racial, and therefore social and economic, equality.” 7
•
“The cotton culture of central Texas represents a special case for the study of class formation and white racial ideology
precisely because it brings together two sets of race and class relations—blacks and whites in the South, and Mexicans and
Anglos in the Southwest.” 4
• “White Texans has a long history of invoking the color line in their social, economic, and political interactions with African
Americans, but they had little experience in plantation society with what one contemporary sociologist called partly colored
races.” Were partly colored Mexicans, in other words, white or nonwhite? As a racially mixed group, Mexicans, like Indians
and Asians, lived in a black-and-white nation that regarded them as neither as black nor as white. Although small numbers of
Mexicans—usually light-skinned, middle-class Mexican Americans—claimed to be Spanish and therefore white, the
overwhelming majority of Texas whites regarded Mexicans as a “mongrelized” race of Indian, African, and Spanish ancestry.
In Texas, unlike other parts of the South, whiteness meant not only not black but also not Mexican.” 5
•
“While immigrant Jews, Slavs, Italians, and Irish were “becoming white” in the urban areas of the East, poor whites in Texas
and elsewhere in the South were heading in the opposite direction—losing whiteness and the status and privileges that
36
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whiteness bestowed. Poor whites in the cotton South came not only to be seen as a social problem but also to be located in
the racial hierarchy as the “trash of whiteness.” 6
“Successful whites—cotton growers, merchants, bankers, and those whom eugenicists often called Nordic whites—began to
racialize poor whites as the “scrubs and runts” of white civilization, both as an excuse to displace them and as a justification
for the impoverished condition of those who remained.” 6
“The emergence of a rural class of “white trash” made white conscious of themselves as a racial group and fearful that if
they fell to the bottom, they would lose the racial privileges that came with being accepted for what they were not—black,
Mexican, or foreign born.” 7
“The Irish, for example, remained outside the circle of whiteness until they learned the meaning of whiteness and adopted its
racial ideology. Texas Germans who belonged to the Republican Party did not share the racial animosity of other whites
toward Mexicans and blacks and were frequently suspected of being traitors to their race.” 8
“Since not all European groups became white at the same time or came to enjoy the “property right” in whiteness equally, the
fissuring of whiteness in the region into Nordic white businessmen farmers and poor white tenants is a central concern of this
study, for “white trash” ruptured the convention that maintained whiteness as an unmarked and normative racial identity.” 8
“Tenant farmers occupied a higher class position on the agricultural ladder than did sharecroppers, mainly because they
owned their own plows, work animals, and tools…As true renters, they owned the crop and therefore were legally entitled to
sell it themselves.” 10
“As one might expect, therefore, the majority of share tenants in central Texas were white, whereas most Mexicans and
blacks, who often owned little or no capital, were sharecroppers or migrant workers.” 10
“this study assumes that whites are raced, men are gendered, and women are marked by class.” 11
“The interests of men and women were not necessarily identical in a society that subordinated women to men in the family
and denied women any power in politics….For men and women of different races the “genderic” experience of class position
is even more profound: A world of difference existed between the experience, for example, of an African American wife of a
sharecropper and that of a white male sharecropper. Any race and class analysis of farming culture must therefore account
for the labor of women (and children), because farming, by definition, was a collective endeavor that required their labor in
the fields and in the household. Single men imply did not operate farms, and certainly the work provided by the hands of
women and children was a prime consideration for owners in renting to share tenants or sharecroppers.” 12
“The image of men plowing the fields behind their mules obscures the fact that men could not be tenants and sharecroppers
in the first place were it not for the labor power of their wives and children.” 12
“In the first chapter I explain how the Texas Revolution and the War with Mexico laid the foundation for racializing
Mexicans as nonwhites.” 13
“In chapter 2 I argue that immigration of Mexicans into Texas after 1910 constituted a “second color menace” in the western
South and sundered the racial dyad of white and black. In the South the color line separated monolithic whiteness from
debased blackness; in central Texas, however, Mexicans walked the color line.” 13
“The intersection of race and technology on large-scale cotton ranches is the subject of chapter 5. The growth of cotton
ranches accompanied, and in many ways abetted, changes in the racial geography of the workforce. Large business farms
like the Taft Ranch demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of producing cotton profitably through mechanization and the
“scientific management” of its Mexican, black, and white workers.” 14
“Chapter 6 is an analysis of the ways in which the ideology of yeoman manhood served as the linchpin of gendered
whiteness. Mexican, black, and white farm women shared overlapping identities as women, mothers, wives, and daughters
as well as owners, tenants, sharecroppers, and wage workers. Women of different classes and races contested gendered
notions of farm life by transgressing the boundary between men’s work and women’s work and attacking the agrarian,
patriarchal ideology that praised the role of the farmer’s helpmate while ignoring her needs entirely.” 14
“In the last two chapters I consider the impact of the New Deal programs on the racialization of the rural workforce and the
efforts of agricultural workers—Mexicans, blacks, and whites—to organize against the worst abuses of the new order.” 15
“The story thus ends with the massive disruptions to the farm order of the South and Southwest caused by New Deal
agricultural programs in the 1930s. At the national political level, the interstate migration of displaced white—“Okies” and
“Arkies”—brought to the nation’s attention the growing social, political, and economic problems associated with the rapid
development of agribusiness farming in the Southwest and West and its growing reliance on immigrant Mexican labor—a
discovery that reified the racial boundaries of farmwork around “off-white” Okies and Mexicans.” 15
“The white scourge was thus not simply an allusion to the immiseration of thousands of white tenants on cotton farms in
Texas but also to the menace of poor whites—the trash of whiteness—to what the contemporary eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard
called “white and world supremacy.” 204
“The Great Depression undermined the eugenicist notion that Nordic whites were inherently more successful than poor
whites and nonwhites because it affected the biologically fit as well as the unfit. Yet those who suffered least in the rural
areas of the South were in fact those who best fit the eugenic description of Nordic whites—the successful owners of cotton
farms, large and small, who were able to take advantage of government programs to purchase more land and tractors as they
rid themselves of superfluous tenant farmers. In their places they hired poor white, Mexican, and black sharecroppers whom
they could “scientifically manage” in a fashion not unlike the way in which eugenicists hoped to manage the “germ plasm” of
the white race.” 204
37
“Wartime industry created a labor scarcity in agriculture that formalized the bilateral agreement between the United States
and Mexico to provide Mexican “guest workers” in the United States—the Bracero Program.” 205
• “Despite their objections to the program, Texas growers formally asked for braceros in 1943. However, the Mexican
government refused to allow braceros to work in Texas until the state guaranteed their fair treatment and an end to de facto
segregation and over discrimination against all Mexicans…Texas cotton growers nevertheless desired braceros to keep wages
low and the labor supply abundant. In an effort to persuade the Mexican government that Texas no longer regardd Mexicans
as targets for racial discrimination…the state legislature in 1943 to pass the so-called Caucasian Race Resolution.” 206
• “Not only did growers prefer Mexican barceros in order to avoid paying wages at domestic levels, they also used braceros as
a reserve labor supply to undercut attempts at farm unionization, especially by the NFLU and the NAWU.” 207
• Mexicans and blacks tried to marry each other to claim whiteness for their children and better schools.
Sources: state papers, journals, theory
Connections: Oropeza, Raza Si, Gutierrez, Walls, Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights, D’Emilio, Last Prophet, Goodman, Land,
Lemann, Promised, Takaki, Double, Dower, War Without Mercy, Litwack, Been, Avila, Popular, Findlay, Magic, Payne, I’ve,
Sanchez, Becoming, Jacobson, Whiteness, Daniels, Guarding
•
Seymour Martin Lipset & Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2000)
Argument: “It is the purpose of this book to examine the validity of the main lines of explanation that have been put forward in these
literatures. In doing so, we hope to provide not only a political sociology of socialism’s failure in the United States, but larger insights
into American society and polity. Our project has been guided from the beginning by the conviction that however politicized the
intellectual terrain, we could offer an explanation as plausible to a person whose sympathies lie on the right of the political spectrum
as to one whose sympathies lie on the left.” 10
• “Our goal is the explore the explanatory power of comparison—within the United States across (and within) different
national contexts, and over time—for a classic question of American historiography.” 10
• “For radicals, “American exceptionalism” meant a specific question: Why did the United States, alone among industrial
societies, lack a significant socialist movement or labor party.” 15
• “The strong egalitarian commitment of the Workingmen’s parties did not lead them to advocate socialism, collective
ownership, or equality of result. Rather, they wished to open up opportunity for all and to reduce the advantages of those
born to privilege. In this sense, their leaders were premature social Darwinists, not Marxists. The parties secured sizable
votes in state and municipal elections, as Marx was glad to note.” 20
• “One source of the movement’s failure was “the taking up of some of its most popular demands by one of the old parties.”
The Jacksonian Democrats responded to the electoral successes of this third-party movement by showing “greater concern
than ever before for the various reform provisions of the Workingmen’s program.” 20
• “Like subsequent generations of Progressives and liberals, the Workingmen’s parties protested the growth of private and
public monopolies and limits on competition. They did not try to curtail free enterprises or inequality of income; instead they
sought meritocracy within capitalism.” 21
• “Racial heterogeneity and large-scale immigration were two obvious related differences between the United States and
Europe. The former was generally ignored as a source of socialist weakness by socialist writers; the latter received much
more attention. However, Marx and Engles pointed to the role of ethnic diversity in undermining class consciousness by
giving native-born white workers a privileged position, thus enabling the bourgeoisie to play workers of different racial and
ethnic backgrounds against one another.” 29
• “The American ideology, stemming from the Revolution, can be subsumed in five words: antistatism, laissez-faire,
individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.” 30
• “While Tocqueville emphasized the role of non-state supported denominations in fostering politically relevant voluntary
associations, Marx and Engels stressed how Protestant sectarianism underpinned competitive individualism and produced
moralistic and political sectarianism in America. These, in turn, impeded collectivist politics.” 34
• “Lenin…emphasized that the weakness of socialism in America stemmed from “the absence of any at all big, nation-wide
democratic tasks facing the proletariat.” American socialism was weak precisely which confront the proletariat with purely
socialist tasks.” 35
• “Engels also noted other ways that America’s political system contributed to the weakness of organized radicalism. In 1893,
in listing factors preventing the growth of a workers’ third-party alternative, he emphasized “the Constitution…which causes
every vote for any candidate not put up by one of the two governing parties to appear to be lost. And the American…wants to
influence his state; he does not want to throw his vote away.” He stressed the difficulty of creating a third party, where there
was no second ballot (runoff), and concluded, during the period of the greatest strength of the Populists in the 1890s, that
“there is no place yet in America for a third party,” because of the size, complexity, and heterogeneity of the country.” 37
• “The Depression Europeanized American politics and American labor organizations. Social class became more important as
a source of party support. Conservatives, increasingly concentrated in the Republican party, remained antistatist and laissezfaire, though many became willing to accommodate a somewhat more activist role for the state as envisaged in the Roosevelt
New Deal. This accommodation, however, gradually dissolved after World War II, in response to long-term prosperity,
which helped to produce a return to classic libertarian values, i.e. conservativism, American-style. The lessening of class
tensions which reached their height in the Depression has been reflected in the marked decline in union membership since the
mid-1950s and in the declining salience of class position for voting. Even before Ronald Reagan entered the White House,
38
the United States had a lower rate of taxation, a smaller deficit as a proportion of GNP, a less-developed welfare state, and
fewer government-owned industries that other western industrialized nations.” 40
• “We have argued that basic rules of the political game in the United States—the plurality electoral system, the presidency,
the separation of powers, and primaries—sustain a two-party duopoly at the national level. The American political system
creates incentives and disincentives for two, and only two, broad, porous, ideologically diffuse national political parties. The
efforts of the Socialist party to survive as a third party alongside the two major parties was doomed by institutional
arrangements over which it had little or no power. From this standpoint the fate of the Socialist party may be regarded as a
particular example of the inability of all minor-party attempts to survive in competition with the major parties.” 82
• “No socialist candidate has ever become a vehicle for major protest in the United States. Voters in the country of classical
liberalism, antistatism, libertarianism, and loose class structure have not turned to statist or class-conscious parties even when
under severe economic stress.” 82
• “The effect of federalism for socialism is double-edged. It weakened the state as an instrument of reform and denied to
socialists the possibility of organizing against national exploitation. Yet federalism also allowed socialists the possibility of
electoral success and executive control in political units much smaller than the country as a whole.” 83
• “The gift of suffrage appears to be a more convincing explanation for socialist weakness. Suffrage for white males prior to
industrialization helped integrate labor into the mainstream parties along ethnic and religious lines and thereby diminish class
as a source of party-political cleavage. The strength of the major parties within organized labor and the relative weakness of
the class cleavage narrowed the political space available to the Socialist party in the early years of the twentieth century.”
• “In the United States, alone among the English-speaking democracies, the major working-class-oriented party operated in
isolation from the mainstream of the union movement. Not only was the Socialist party established autonomously from the
American Federation of Labor, but, for the most part, the two organizations were locked into intense mutual hostility. This
harmed the party in several ways. It severely weakened the party’s membership and resource base. The Socialist party never
became a mass party, but remained a small organization spread thinly across a very large country. Like other socialist parties
it lacked powerful or rich supporters, but unlike them it could not draw on mass organization to even the balance.” 123
• “The party appealed to members more on ideological than on interest grounds, and as a result its membership fluctuated
wildly over time.” 123
• “Ethnic diversity hurt socialists, who appealed to workers along class lines, and helped Democrats and Republicans, who had
no inhibitions in making ethnic appeals. The difficulties faced by socialists were aggravated because craft unions in the
American Federation of Labor (AFL) were also organized along ethnic lines, encompassing native workers and “old”
immigrants from Northern Europe and largely excluding “new” immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, along with
Chinese and African-Americans.” 125
• “Moreover capitalism, which, unlike socialism, does not promise to eliminate poverty, racism, sexism, pollution, or war,
appeals only weakling to idealism inherent in the position of young people and intellectuals.” 293
Sources: Intellectual theory works
Connections: Leuchtenberg, FDR, Perils, Kennedy, Over, Brinkley, End, Daniels, Guarding, Jacobsen, Whiteness, Gerstle, American
Crucible, Foley, White Scourge, Hartz, The American Liberal Tradition
David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954)
Argument:
• “Professor Potter’s study really falls into three parts. The first is an elaboration of his perception that all historians implicitly
employ the concept of national character as part of their underlying assumption that history can be written, that something
more than geography and the accidents of political dominion unify members of a society which is being studied, that a
society is something more than an arbitrary conglomerate of persons.” 182, Goer
• “The main section of Professor Potter’s book is an examination of the impact of the idea and fact of American economic
abundance on various American institutions; and the key of this section is the reevaluation of F.J. Turners’ epoch-marking
Significance of the Frontier in American History, which as Professor Potter pertinently points out, could have, with perfect
validity, been entitled “the Influence of the Frontier on American Character.” Professor Potter emphasizes that although the
description of American characteristics in this classic essay stand the test of time, the conclusions about the disappearance of
the frontier do not; and further that the reasons why these conclusions have been falsified is because Turner was, though only
tacitly, a physiocrat, who thought that the only source of real wealth was the undeveloped fertility of the soil and that
consequently, when all the fertile soil was owned or cultivated, expansion would cease. But wealth is created by the
interaction of technology on the environment, not by the environment along; the better mousetrap, as well as the two blades
of grass, constitutes a psychological frontier.” 184, Goer
• “[Potter] He argues that American political forms are the result, not the cause, of the economic abundance, and that the major
reason for the consistent failure to export “Americanism” has been because the attempt has always been to export the political
forms without the prosperity or the attitude to production which alone can give them validity.” 184, Goer
Sources: Behavioral studies books
Connections: Cohen, Consumer’s, Leach, Land of Desire, Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s,”
Matusow, The Unraveling of America, Potter, People of Plenty, Davies, From Opportunity
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955)
39
Argument: The uniqueness of America is that it was born free. It lacked a feudalistic past, which resulted in a lack of social
revolution and Marxian movement.
• “The author’s tone is polemical, for his purpose is revisionist. Critical of a scholarship that separates American from
European history, he also clobbers “progressive historians” for stressing social conflicts instead of Lockian, and therefore
liberal, consensus so pervasive and so continuous as to constitute the “American Way of Life.” 653, Mann
• “By Lockian, the author means that antithesis of feudal and clerical oppressions, the Enlgihtenment: private property, the
atomistic society, popular sovereignty, limited government, and natural rights. Unlike Europe, America skipped feudalism
and so achieved these values without a revolution against an ancien regime. Therein, Mr. Hartz observes, lies the uniqueness
of the New World. Lacking both feudalism and a social revolution, the nation was spared a restoration. It was also spared a
major Marxian movement, whose categories, deriving from feudalism and the struggles to obliterate and restore it, are native
to the Old World but alien to the New.” 653, Mann
• “Until 1840, the wealthy middle class in America, whether Federalist or Whig, took the American democrat for the mob.
Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, in their turn, regarded the Whigs and the Federalists as aristocrats…The Federalists and
Whigs were identical to the liberal European bourgeoisie, lacking, however, a landed aristocracy to bring out their liberalism.
As for the American democrat, he was a small capitalist or an incipient Whig—a discovery that the Whigs made in the Log
Cabin Campaign of 1840 and exploited until the crash of 1929.” 654, Mann
• “The America described by Louis Hartz is the America discovered by Europeans in America and by Americans in Europe.”
• “Dr. Hartz…sticks to the older and more universal meaning, of European origin: his liberal—the “American democrat”—is
one who believes in individual liberty, equality, and capitalism and who regards the human marketplace, where a person
succeeds or fails by his or her own efforts and ability, as the proper testing ground of achievement.” Ix
• Hartz “argues persuasively that the liberal tradition in America was the natural consequence of a phenomenon noted by
Tocqueville: “The great advantage of the Americans is, that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to
endure a democratic revolution; and they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” X
• “Even the New Deal, in the Hartz analysis, was conceived not as a revolutionary doctrine or from any “systematic social
thought” but out of “a submerged and absolute liberal faith.” It was devised, presented, and seen by most Americans as
“experimentation” and “problem solving” permissible within that faith. Therefore Herbert Hoover, though “hurling liberal
abstractions” in dissent, was ineffective as a critic of a pragmatic program, many of whose ideas “liberal Republicans” later
were able to adopt. Yet in a time of economic and social crisis the New Deal was sufficiently “radical” in practice to satisfy
the need for action and to prevent socialism from making political headway against ingrained American liberalism.” xi
• ““The basic ethical problem of liberal society,” Dr. Hartz argues, is “not the danger of the majority which has been its
conscious fear, but the danger of unanimity, which has slumbered unconsciously behind it.” This near-unanimity of
fundamental belief means that when Americans face “military and ideological pressure from without”—as they have in
contemporary times—the national response to a threatening heresy is an instinctive closing of ranks that “transform
eccentricity into sin” and dissent into danger of subversion and betrayal.” Xi
• “Hence, most prominently, the “red scares” of the 1920s and 1950s, during which, Dr. Hartz tartly observes, “the American
liberal community contained far fewer radicals than any other Western society, but the hysteria against them was much vaster
than anywhere else.”” Xi
• “The analysis which this book contains is based on…that America was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical
oppressions of the Old World. If there is anything in this view, as old as the national folklore itself, then the outstanding
thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the non-existence of those oppressions, or since the
reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.” 3
• “It is not accidental that America which has uniquely lacked a feudal tradition has uniquely lacked also a socialist tradition.
The hidden origin of socialist thought everywhere in the West is to be found in the feudal ethos.” 6
• “law has flourished on the corpse of philosophy in America, for the settlement of the ultimate moral question is the end of
speculation upon it. Pragmatism, interestingly enough America’s great contribution to the philosophic tradition, does not
alter this, since it feeds itself on the Lockian settlement.” 10
• “There has never been a “liberal movement” or a real “liberal party” in America: we have only had the American Way of
Life, a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved; and we did not even get
that until after the Civil War when the Whigs of the nation, deserting the Hamiltonian tradition, saw the capital that could be
made out of it…Ironically, “liberalism” is a stranger in the land of its greatest realization and fulfillment.” 11
• “When a liberal community facees military and ideological pressure from without it transforms eccentricity into sin, and the
irritating figure of the bourgeois gossip flowers into the frightening figure of an A. Mitchell Palmer or a Senator McCarthy.”
• “What we learn from the concept of a liberal society, lacking feudalism and therefore socialism and governed by an irrational
Lockianism, is that the domestic struggles of such a society have all be projected with the setting of Western liberal
alignments. And here there begin to emerge, not a set of negative European correlations, but a set of very positive ones
which have been almost completely neglected. We can thus say of the right in America that it exemplifies the tradition of big
propertied liberalism in Europe, a tradition familiar enough…” 15
Sources: theory
Connections: Leuchtenberg, FDR, Perils, Kennedy, Over, Brinkley, End, Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz,” Lipset &
Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here
40
James T. Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America” Reviews in American History 29
(2001)
Argument: “I advance two arguments. First, despite itse importance as a historical document, The Liberal Tradition in America
provides an inadequate account because Hartz focused exclusively on issues of economics and psychology and missed the constitutive
roles played by democracy, religion, race, ethnicity, and gender in American History. He therefore misunderstood…the complicated
and changing dynamics of the democratic struggle that has driven American social and political conflict since the seventeenth
century…Second, acknowledging the inaccuracies of LTA is important for us, because the widespread acceptance of its argument has
had consequences unfortunate for the study of American political thought and poisonous for political debate. The time has come to
refocus our attention away from the Cold War era controversies over liberalism and socialism, and away form more recent
controversies over liberalism and republicanism, and turn our attention toward democracy.” 460
• “The stubborn persistence of belief in an American liberal tradition of the sort Hartz described obscures both our
understanding of our nation’s past and our ability to envision strategies toward a more democratic future.” 465
• “In order to grasp this all-encompassing liberal tradition, Hartz argued, we must compare America with Europe. Only then
can we understand not only the absence of socialism and conservatism but the stultifying presence and “moral unanimity”
imposed by “this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life.” 461
• “Whereas Tocqueville did indeed stress the absence of feudalism in America, he also emphasized the importance of religion,
the legacy of English law and liberty, the fact of slavery, the uniquely elevated status of women, the law and liberty, the fact
of slavery, the uniquely elevated status of women, the distinctive pattern of decentralized settlement in North America, a set
of sturdy political institutions and wise founding documents, and other socio-cultural, geographical, and demographic factors
that together constitute the history of the United States.” 462
• “Hartz skirted the issue of evidence and reiterated his earlier proclamation of American uniqueness: “The United States is
distinctive as against Europe, and its distinctiveness derives from the fact that the Mayflower left behind in Europe the
experiences of class, revolution, ad collectivism out of which the European socialist movement arose…then explains that “
Hartz was all along basically using history for the sake of eliciting answers to some theoretical queries in connections with
the nature of a free society; and those fundamental issues remain with us today.” 463
• “Before examining the particular arguments of LTA, I want to note the almost complete lack of absence from Hartz’s analysis
of four issues that now seem to American historians essential to understanding our nation’s past: race, ethnicity, gender, and
religion.” 463
• “Hartz contended that because religion in eighteenth-century America generated neither iconoclasm nor anticlericalism, it
was of only minor significance. Colonial religious diversity “meant that the revolution would be led in part by fierce
Dissenting ministers.” In Europe, “where reactionary church establishments had made the Christian concept of sin and
salvation into an explicit pillar of the status quo, liberals were forced to develop a political religion—as Rousseau saw it—if
only in answer to it.” But American liberals, “instead of being forced to pull the Christian heaven down to earth, were glad to
let it remain where it was. They did not need to make a religion out of the revolution because religion was already
revolutionary” (40-41)” 464
• “First, because the standard continental European—or, more precisely, French and Italian—division between an anticlerical
republican left and an entrenched Church hierarchy generated cultural and political warfare that American religious divisions
did not, Hartz concluded that religion in America could safely be fitted within the liberal consensus. Second, Hartz did not
realize how corrosive to his argument was his concession that American “religion was already revolutionary,” perhaps
because, like many secular Jewish intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century, he either failed to see or refused to
acknowledge the pivotal role of Christianity in shaping American public life.” 464
• “In America religious identity (like racial, ethnic, and gender identity) has…been a central, constitutive component of
American culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Almost all Americans’ “structures of meaning,” to use a
phrase of David Hall’s, have derived from an unsteady blend of religious and secular, elite and popular, male and female,
white and nonwhite cultures. For that reason religion does not shrink to insignificance but exerts a powerful force shaping
individual decisions, interpretations of experience, and social interactions. The diversity of Americans’ religious
commitments prevented the emergence of a state church, as Hartz noted, but the depth and persistence of those commitments
likewise undermined the simple, straightforward Lockean attachment to self-interested property-seeking that Hartz defined as
the essence of America.” 646
• “As I examine the principal arguments Hartz advanced, I will briefly compare his characterizations of (1) the American
Revolution, (2) antebellum American politics, (3) the progressive era, (4) the New Deal, and (5) the culture o the post-World
War II United States with the findings of more recent historical scholarship.” 465
• “The significance of the American Revolution lay not so much in the founders’ liberalism, which was complicated by its
mixture with republican and religious values, as in their commitment to nourishing the seeds of a democratic culture. They
constructed or altered institutions that made possible continuous mediation, the endless production of compromise, a system
deliberately calculated to satisfy some of the aspirations of all citizens and all of the aspirations of none.” 466
• “It is ture that such comfort with compromise did indeed distinguish the American founders from later Jacobins and
Blosheviks. But it is crucial to see that they emphatically did not agree to codify atomistic individualism, because that idea
appealed to practically no one—neither Federalists nor Anti-federalists...[Adams] He and his contemporaries were not trying
to make a world safe for bankers—whose work Adams described acidly in a letter to Jefferson as “an infinity of successive
41
felonious larcenies”—but were seeking instead to create a liberal republic safe for worldly ascetics, a “Christian Sparta” in
the phrase of Samuel Adams, where even those who failed to reach that lofty ethical ideal might not only survive but thrive.”
• “Hartz argued that even though laissez faire did not exist in early America, the activity of state governments served only to
facilitate economic activity. The same assumption also drove his interpretation of antebellum America in LTA.” 467
• “From Hartz’s perspective, the quarrels were between Whigs and Democrats betrayed “a massive confusion in political
thought” that stemmed from both sides’ refusal to concede their shared commitment to liberal capitalism. Whereas Whigs
really should have become Tories, and Jacksonians really should have been socialists, instead they all mutated into the
“American democrat,” a “pathetic” figure “torn by an inner doubt,” not quite a Hercules but a Hurcules with the brain of a
Hamlet.” (117-19).” 467
• “Likewise Hartz, when confronting Whigs who advocated reform in a language of self-discipline and harmony and
Jacksonians who spoke in terms of equality and democracy, refused to admit that antebellum Americans saw themselves,
each other, and their culture in terms quite different from his. Rather than modifying or abandoning his theory, Hartz
“blamed the world” of American history.” 467
• “Careful analysis of nineteenth-century America shows instead that within as well as between North and South, Americans
differed on many fundamental issues. Only the culture and institutions of democracy…provided ways to mediate those deep
disagreements.” 468
• “Hartz understood progressivism, as did many of his contemporaries, including Richard Hoftstadter, as Woodrow Wilson’s
futile harkening back to a lost world of small towns and small businesses, an exercise in nostalgia with no political or
economic consequences.” 468
• “Diverse and incompatible as their strategies were, progressives nevertheless constructed from the materials they inherited a
new order in governance, law, business, social organization, and culture. Louis Brandies lost his battle against bigness, yet
the government regulation of private enterprise became a permanent fact of life. The NAACP failed to enact all of its
program, yet the civil rights movement, launched as LTA appeared, employed not only rights-talk but images of deliverance
and salvation from Exodus and Mathew rather than Hartz’s language of the main chance. The crusade for women’s rights
reached only a limited fulfillment in the franchise, yet feminists have invoked a variety of ideals concerning moral autonomy,
civic responsibility, and more egalitarian households equally incompatible with Hartz’s framework. Finally, the social
democrats among American progressives failed to achieve their goals of a more egalitarian structure for work or wages, yet,
from the platforms of the Populist Party in 1892 and the Progressive Party in 1912 through the agendas of the New Deal and
the Fair Deal, such ambitious plans were at the heart, rather than on the margins, of political debate.” 469
• “Given his Eurocentric framework, Hartz understandably placed the piecemeal, pragmatic New Deal, limited as it was by
Roosevelt’s ability to forge a consensus from the fractured pieces on his party’s coalition, comfortably within the liberal
tradition.” 470
• “ FDR’s 1944 State of the Union Address called for a “second bill of rights” assuring all Americans access to education, a
job with a living wage, adequate housing, medical care, and insurance against old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.
FDR campaigned—and was reelected—on just such a platform in 1944. Such proposals, which formed the core of the G.I
Bill, were also central to Truman’s Fair Deal. This far-reaching legislative program, caught in the cross-fire between an
incipient Cold War aversion to government activity and southern Democrats’ animosity toward equal treatment of African
Americans, was defeated so decisively in Congress that historians refuse to believe either FDR or Truman could have been
serious about them…Hartz’s judgment: since the New Deal did not try to bring socialism to America, its reformism must
have been tepid at best.” 470
• “Hartz persuaded political theorists that there is no reason to study American political thought. Because America had no
social conflict, he argued, Americans contributed “relatively little political thought at all.” 472
Sources: Hartz, LTA
Connections: Leuchtenberg, FDR, Perils, Kennedy, Over, Brinkley, End, Hartz, Liberal Tradition, Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here
Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, Matusow, The Unraveling of America, Potter, People of Plenty, Davies, From Opportunity
Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocquevile, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America” The American Political
Science Review Vol 87. No. 3 (Sep., 1993)
Argument: “Tocqueville’s thesis—that America has been most shaped by the unusually free and egalitarian ideas and material
conditions that prevailed at its founding—captures important truths. Nonetheless, the purpose of this essay is to challenge that thesis
by showing that its adherents fail to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have shaped the participants and
the substance of American politics just as deeply. For over 80% of U.S., history, its laws declared most of the world’s population to
be ineligible for full American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. For at least two-thirds of
American history, the majority of the domestic adult population was also ineleigble for full citizenship for the same reasons.” 549
• “The Tocquevillian story is thus deceptive because it is too narrow. It is centered on relationships among a minority of
Americans (white men, largely of northern European ancestry) analyzed via reference to categories derived from the
hierarchy of political and economic statuses men have held in Europe: monarchs and aristocrats, commercial burghers,
farmers, industrial and rural laborers, and indigents.” 549
42
There was no heredity monarchy or aristocracy in America but there were ascriptive systems. “Men were thought
naturally suited to rule over women, within both the family and polity. White northern Europeans were thought superior
culturally—and probably biologically—to black Africans, bronze Native Americans, and indeed all other races and
civilizations. Many British Americans also treated religion as an inherited condition and regarded Protestants as created by
God to be morally and politically, as well as theologically, superior to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others.” 549
• “Over time, American intellectual and political elites elaborated distinctive justifications for these ascriptive systems,
including inegalitarian scriptural readings, the scientific racism of the “American school” of ethnology, racial and sexual
Darwinism, and the romantic cult of Anglo-Saxonism in American historiography.” 549
• “Thus to approach a truer picture of America’s political culture and its characteristic conflicts, we must consider more than
the familiar categories of (absent) feudalism and socialism and (pervasive) bourgeois liberalism and republicanism.” 550
• “To be sure, America’s ascriptive, unequal statuses and the ideologies by which they have been defended have always been
heavily conditioned and constrained by the presence of liberal democratic values and institutions. The reverse, however, is
also true. Although liberal democratic ideas and practices have been more potent in America than elsewhere, American
politics is best seen as expressing the interaction of multiple political traditions, including liberalism, republicanism, and
ascriptive forms of Americanism, which have collectively comprised American political culture, without any constituting it as
a whole.” 550
• “Ascriptive outlooks have had such a hold in America because they have provided something that neither liberalism nor
republicanism has done so well. They have offered creditable intellectual and psychological reasons for many Americans to
believe that their social roles and personal characteristics express an identity that has inherent and transcendent worth, thanks
to nature, history, and God.” 550
• “My chief aim here is to persuade readers that many leading accounts of American political culture are inadequate. I will
also suggest briefly how analyses with greater descriptive and explanatory power an be achieved by replacing the
Tocquevillian thesis with a multiple-traditions view of America. This argument is relevant to contemporary politics in two
ways. First, it raises the possibility that novel intellectual, political, and legal systems reinforcing racial, ethnic, and gender
inequalities might be rebuilt in America in years ahead…Second, the political implications of the view that America has
never been completely liberal, and that changes have come only through difficult struggles and then have often not been
sustained, are very different from the complacency—sometimes despair—engendered by beliefs that liberal democracy has
always been hegemonic.” 550
• “I argue that Tocqueville himself was much more perceptive than his modern “Tocquevillian” followers…Finally, I shall
illustrate the merits of a multiple-traditions approach by showing how it offers more insight into the qualified but extensive
creation of new systems of ascriptive inequality during the post-Reconstruction and Progressive eras.” 550
• “The multiple-traditions thesis holds that Americans share a common culture but one more complexly and multiply
constituted than is usually acknowledged. Most members of all groups have shared and often helped to shape all the
ideologies and institutions that have structured American life, including ascriptive ones: A few have done so while resisting
all subjugating practices. But members of every group have sometimes embraced “essentialist” ideologies valorizing their
own ascriptive traits and denigrating those of others, to bleak effect.” 558
• “As its heart, the multiple-traditions thesis holds that the definitive feature of American political culture has been not its
liberal, republican, or “ascriptive Americanist” elements but, rather, this more complex pattern of apparently inconsistent
combinations of the traditions, accompanied by recurring conflicts.” 558
• “In sum, if we accept that ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy have shaped America in interaction with its
liberal and democratic features, we can make more sense of a wide range of inegalitarian policies newly contrived after 1870
and perpetuated through much of the twentieth century.” 562
Sources: Tocqueville, Hartz, Myrdal, and Theory
Connections: Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s,” Matusow, The Unraveling of America,
Potter, People of Plenty, Davies, From Opportunity
•
Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (1996)
Argument: “In narrow terms, this book seeks to illuminate the unique transformation in liberal perspectives on entitlement and
dependency that occurred during the Great Society era. It also hopes to expose the dynamics of a broader ideological and tactical shift
that had profound political consequences.” 6
• “Considering the great social reform eras of the twentieth century more generally, it soon becomes clear that the most
successful reform-minded politicians have been those who responded to changing social and economic conditions by
adapting rather than replacing the language of individualism. The language of opportunity has remained central to American
discourse about economic security, and in this context Moynihan’s proposal was entirely unexceptional. Like Lyndon
Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, he understood that a liberal political agenda could not be advanced unless it was seen to
respect the nation’s dominant social philosophy.” 2
• “The principal reason why traditional and authentically liberal notions of self-help and personal independence sounded novel
or conservative in the 1980s and 1990s is that these ideals largely disappeared from liberal discourse during the late 1960s
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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and 1970s. In their place came radical notions of income by right, and American liberalism remains associated in the
public mind with an entitlements doctrine that in reality lies outside its broader political tradition.” 3
“Although the history of twentieth-century reform does indeed include the extension of new entitlements to deprived or
otherwise deserving populations, the notion of an unconditional right to income clearly exceeds the bounds of that tradition.
Accordingly, when Democrats today employ the language of obligation, it is wrong to depict them as representatives of a
new breed, freed from the permissive doctrines of New Deal—Great Society liberalism.” 3
In 1964, when President Johnson unveiled his War on Poverty, liberal legislators enthusiastically endorsed its individualistic
approach. For reasons both of convenience and conviction, the Economic Opportunity Act characterized welfare as part of
the poverty problem rather than as a mechanism for eliminating want. Eight years later…According to the new orthodoxy,
which the NWRO [National Welfare Rights Organization] proposal embodied, the federal government had an immediate
obligation to raise all poor Americans above the poverty level by guaranteeing them an income, no questions asked. By the
time of McGovern’s ill-fated quest for the presidency, the dominant strain of American liberalism had come to share this
view, and to denigrate those who made demands on the poor of the sort that had won universal approval in 1964.” 3
“This book asks how American liberals came to repudiate a venerable and politically valuable individualist tradition, in favor
of radically “un-American” definitions of income entitlement.” 3
“In an environment of acute social tension and political dislocation, it is argued, previously unattractive income redistribution
schemes acquired new appeal. Characteristic of much of this scholarship is the belief that the “income strategy,” for all its
seeming novelty, represented a logical outgrowth of the earlier initiative. Antipoverty officials, according to this view, were
drawn to the income strategy from an early stage, motivated by the manifest insufficiency of the Economic Opportunity Act
as a response to structural poverty.” 4
“An important aspect of the failure of the War on Poverty to achieve its goals was the development of a supposed “welfare
crisis.” Three elements of this widely identified but variously defined crisis were the rapid growth of the unpopular Aid to
Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), continued inequality of benefits between states, and the growing
incidence of single parenthood in the ghetto. Radicals, liberals, and conservatives alike were drawn to the idea of a radical
overhaul of the welfare system, and each could find some merit in guaranteed income strategy.” 4
“The problem with existing analyses of the guaranteed income movement…They explain why activists, bureaucrats, social
workers, and academics were drawn to the income strategy; in each case, conviction was matched by political interest…But
they fail to explain why American liberalism was drawn to such radically unpopular versions of that strategy as the Adequate
Income Act of 1972. It is important to distinguish the income strategy of Richard Nixon—motivated by efficiency, concern
for the working poor, and hostility to New Deal-Great Society bureaucracies—from that of George McGovern—fueled by
extravagant definitions of income by right.” 5
“On the face of it, their advocacy revealed a suicidal disregard for popular sensibilities: Polled in 1969, even the poor had
expressed their opposition to the guaranteed income concept.” 6
“In retrospect, it is clear that the decline of the New Deal coalition after the mid-1960s facilitated the rise of the right to
political dominance. At the time, however, many liberals found reason for hope in a phenomenon that came to be labeled the
New Politics. Committed to the politics of protest, and fundamentally hostile to traditional liberalism, New Politics radicals
seized control of the Democratic Party nominating process during the early 1970s...“the rise of an alternative coalition of
Democratic elites, different in social background, political experience, and policy preference from the coalition which had
previously dominated the national Democratic elites.””6
“This book presents is [income by right] as a largely unsuccessful challenge to a social welfare system that has remained
wedded to the connection between economic security and employment” 7
“The principal ambition of the War on Poverty was to ensure that Mead’s “government clients” ceased to be dependent on
federal largesse. If many methods and ambitions of the Economic Opportunity Act were imprecise and unrealistic, it yet
remains that their intention was directly opposite to that which Mead has adduced. And if, as he maintains, these programs
were largely noncoercive in nature, than it is also true that their intended benefits were reserved for those prepared to seize
opportunities.” 7
“In tracing the evolution of liberal perspectives on poverty and dependency during the Great Society era, this book exposes
itself to a number of serious potential objections, not least concerning the nature, extent, and practical relevance of American
individualism. It departs from most recent works on the United States’ welfare state in viewing popular individualism as a
more consistently powerful determinant of social policy than race, gender, or dynamics internal to an autonomous state.” 7
“Both government policies and popular attitudes have upheld the conviction that employment should be a prerequisite for
economic security in most cases; only infrequently has the abandonment of this link been seriously proposed. The tenacity of
the national work ethic is evidenced by American perspectives on public policy toward the jobless. On the one hand, the
unemployment compensation system remains unusually limited, presumably reflecting disquiet at the notion of supporting
inactive, able-bodied adults. But on the other hand, opinion poll data reveal a high level of public support for the alternative
principle that the federal government should be the employer of last resort.” 9
“How did entitlement liberals come to abandon the link between income and work, at a time when the public’s devotion to
the link was so obvious? This book explains the remarkable process by which disaffected Great Society liberals were
propelled along a road that had been almost universally rejected in 1964. The political consequences of this development are
apparent to this day.” 9
44
“Nevertheless, the concept of an unconditional entitlement to income was singular in a number of respects. First, it boldly
confronted notions of reciprocal responsibility that had been long-accepted and retained widespread support, even among the
poor. Second, such proposals as the Adequate Income Act of 1972 rested on the assumption that the causes of poverty were
inseparable from its consequences: poverty was caused as well as defined by inadequate income. Such a judgment validated
the redistributionist approach that had bee rejected in 1964.” 235
• “In 1964, liberals had shared the general tendency to equate dignity with self-sufficiency and to define dependency as its
destructive opposite: long-term reliance on federal support.” 235
• “But by 1972, it had become more common for liberals to define dignity as freedom both from hardship and from the stigma
hitherto attached to dependency. In turn, independence, far from connoting self-sufficiency in the conventional sense, meant
freedom from want, however achieved.” 235
• “The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was founded on two vulnerable premises concerning the practicability of self-help.
First, it tacitly assumed that the deserving poor could be raised to comfortable self-sufficiency were they furnished with
appropriate skills and values (self-esteem, motivation, education, vocational skills). The War on Poverty thereby operated on
the basis that the U.S. economic system was fundamentally beneficent. Second, the program was ostensible colorblind; it
proceeded from the claim that black and white poverty could be treated by the same individualistic methods.” 239
• “With the War on Poverty now so strongly associated with the black struggle for equality, supports of the Economic
Opportunity Act felt inevitably reluctant to demand that the rights of the poor be contingent on their behavior.” 240
• “Vietnam’s importance to the entitlement revolution is profound, albeit indirect. First, the bitterness and ill will it generated
within liberal ranks inevitably impeded cooperation on domestic matters, and not simply because the war diverted funds from
Great Society programs. Second, the language and style of protest represented by the growing antiwar movement came to be
viewed by some dissenting politicians as embodying a New Politics through which the progressive spirit might yet emerge
ascendant from the ashes of 1960s liberalism.” 241
• “Only in 1970 did radical definitions of income entitlement gain important support among liberals.” 241
Sources: speeches, papers, legislation, polls, lobbyist information
Connections: Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s,” Matusow, The Unraveling of America,
Potter, People of Plenty, Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville”
•
Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2003)
Argument: This study, however, seeks to explore not simply the effects of white flight, but the experience. While many have
assumed that white flight was little more than a literal movement of the white population, this book argues that it represented a much
more important transformation in the political ideology of those involved. Because of their confrontation with the civil rights
movement, white southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery and
instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism. This modern conservatism proved
to be both subtler and stronger than the politics that preceded it and helped southern conservatives dominate the Republican Party and,
through it, national politics as well. White flight, in the end, was more than a physical relocation. It was a political revolution.” 6
• “In his book White Flight, historian Kevin Kruse takes a look at Atlanta, Georgia, to make a case for this other form of [non
violent segregationist] white resistance. He examines the transformation white Atlantans made from more radical and overt
racism into a strategy of rights as taxpayers and homeowners. By “toning down their racist rhetoric and stressing their own
rights,” segregationists encompassed larger and larger groups of white willing to go along with, and even advocate for, the
perpetuation of segregation.” Metz Precis
• “Kruse points out, however, how difficult this white unification proved to be when it played out along class lines. As urban
middle-class whites began to leave the city in large numbers, they sold their homes to black residents, breaking up the white
solidarity of many neighborhoods. For working-class whites who could not afford to make the move out, it became clear that
“the reality of individuality…would always trump the rhetoric of community.” (81).” Metz Precis
• “As Atlanta became systematically desegregated at schools, public pools, lunch counters, and even golf courses, the more
affluent whites retreated into private clubs and schools where they could legally maintain segregation; this was not possible,
in contrast, for lower-class whites. By the end of the 1960s, the flight of most all whites into Atlanta suburbs marked “the
racists’ retreat,” (234) leaving behind the black community, a handful of white liberals and moderate elites. This group left
behind began to run a city government no longer confronted with the resistance of reactionist whites” (242). But, as Kruse
points out, this was not “because such white segregationists changed their minds; it was because they changed their
addresses” (242).” Metz Precis
• “When Atlanta successfully desegregated its public schools in 1961, even national observers paused to marvel at all the city
had accomplished. The city found countless admirers across the country, form the press to the president of the United States,
but it was ultimately its own Mayor William Hartsfield who coined the lasting motto. “Atlanta,” he bragged to anyone in
earshot, “is the City Too Busy to Hate.” 3
• “Just a year later, this image came crashing down. Trouble surfaced in an unlikely place, a quiet, middle-class subdivision of
brick ranch houses and loblolly pines called Peyton Forest. And the trouble started in an unlikely way, as city construction
crews built a pair of roadblocks on Peyton and Harlan Roads. The barriers seemed to have no significance. They were
simply wooden beams, which has been painted black and white, bolted to steel I-beams, and sunk into the pavement. But
their significance lay at their location. As all Atlantans understood, the roadblocks stood at the precise fault line between
black and white sections of the city. Over the previous two decades, black Atlantans had escaped the overcrowded inner city
45
and purchased more and more homes in neighborhoods to the west; during the same period, white Atlantans to the south
had grown increasingly alarmed as those areas “went colored.” The roadblocks were meant to keep these two communities
apart and at peace, but they had the opposite effect. Indeed, the barricades immediately attracted intense national and even
international attention. Civil rights activists surround the racial “buffer zone” with picket lines…” 3
• “In spite of the movement to insure its permanence, the “Peyton Wall” was short-lived. Local courts quickly ruled against the
roadblocks and the mayor, relieved to find a way out of the public relations nightmare, had them immediately removed.” 5
• “This book explores the causes and course of white flight, with Atlanta serving as its vantage point. Although it represented
one of the largest, most significant, and most transformative social movements in postwar America, white flight has never
been studied in depth or detail.” 5
• “This study, however, argues that white resistance to desegregation was never as immobile or monolithic as its practitioners
and chroniclers would have us believe. Indeed, segregationists could be incredibly innovative in the strategies and tactics
they used to confront the civil rights movement.” 7
• “The original goals of massive resistance were, in fact, frequently revisited and revised as the struggle to defend the
“southern way of life” stretched on.” 8
• “Ultimately, the mass migration of whites from cities to suburbs proved to be the most successful segregationist response to
the moral demands of the civil rights movement and the legal authority of the courts. Although the suburbs were just as
segregated as the city—and, truthfully, often more so—white residents succeeded in convincing the courts, the nation, and
even themselves that this phenomenon represented de facto segregation, something that stemmed not from the race-conscious
actions of residents but instead from less offensive issues like class stratification and postwar sprawl.” 8
• “The conventional wisdom has held that they were not only fighting against the rights of others. But, in their own minds,
segregationists were instead fighting for rights of their own—such as the “right” to select their neighbors, their employees,
and their children’s classmates, the “right” to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and,
perhaps most important, the “right” to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal
government.” 9
• “Indeed, form their perspective, it was clearly they who defended individual freedom, while the “so-called civil rights
activists” aligned themselves with a powerful central state, demanded increased government regulation of local affairs, and
waged a sustained assault on the individual economic, social, and political prerogatives of others. The true goal of
desegregation, these white southerners insisted, was not to end the system of racial oppression in the South, but to install a
new system that oppressed them instead.” 9
• “At the same time, segregationist resistance inspired the creation of new conservative causes, such as tuition vouchers, the
tax revolt, and the privatization of public services. Until now, the origins of those phenomena have been located in the
suburban areas of the South and Southwest, a region since christened the “sunbelt.”” 10-11
• “Indeed, a community-level approach helps illuminate the realities of white resistance to desegregation in a number of ways.
First, such a perspective best brings into focus the complex relationships between people and places, which are always their
clearest at the local level…Second, this work employs a community-level approach to demonstrate the interconnected nature
of different stages of white resistance.” 11
• “This study demonstrates, almost counterintuitively, that whites in this segregated city were generally less violent in their
resistance and less successful than their counterparts in the urban North.” 12
• “ This study argues that desegregation had just as significant an impact on the structures and spaces of the urban and
suburban Sunbelt.” 13
Sources: newspapers, journals, eye-witness accounts, legal rulings, municipal debate
Connections: McGirr, Suburban Warriors, Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Gerstle, American Crucible, Findlay, Magic, Avila,
Popular, Segrue, Origins of an Urban Crisis, Self, American Babylon, Jackson, Crabgrass, Chafe, Civilities, Powe, The Warren
Court, D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, Oropeza, Raza Si!, Sanchez, Becoming, Gutierrez, Walls, Jacobsen, Whiteness, Foley, White Scourge,
Davies, From Entitlement, Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” Edsall, Chain Reaction, Oshkinsky, Worse than
Slavery, Litwak, Trouble in the Mind
Alan Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” The American Historical Review Vol. 99 No. 2 April, 1994
Argument: “And so the “problem of American conservatism,” as I define it here, is not a problem facing conservatives themselves
and not a problem conservatives may have created for others. It is a problem of American historical scholarship, the problem of
finding a suitable place for the Right—for its intellectual traditions and its social and political movements—within our
historiographical concerns.” 410
• “it would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its
role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should. Given the history of the last twenty years, that is coming to
seem an ever more curious omission. This essay is an effort to understand why that omission has occurred.” 409
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“Conservatism has not always been the orphan within American historical scholarship it is today. The progressive
historians who dominated the writing of American history through much of the first half of this century placed conservatives
at the center of their interpretive scheme, a scheme that portrayed American history as a long and often intense struggle
between popular democratic elements and entrenched anti-democratic interests. But theirs was a constricted view of
conservatism, focused almost exclusively on economic elites and their efforts to preserve wealth and privilege.” 410
“The consensus scholars did take note of one of the most serious shortcomings of the progressive view of conservatism.
They recognized that the Right did not consist only of elites defending wealth and privilege, that there was a popular, grassroots Right—most immediately visible to them in the alarming rise of “McCarthyism” in the early 1950s—that needed
explanation. But little in their explanations of what such scholars at times called the “radical Rights,” the “New Right,” or
the pseudo-conservative revolt” suggested that conservatives were people whose ideas or grievances should be taken
seriously or that the Right deserved attention as a distinct element of the American political tradition.” 411
“New Left scholarship, which attacked the consensus with great effectiveness for ignoring or marginalizing the Left, had
relatively little to say about the Right. That was in part because of the way much of the New Left celebrated, even
romanticized, “the people.” Having repudiated the liberal suspicion of “mass politics” and embraced instead the concept of
“participatory democracy,” scholars of the Left had difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but
democratic and progressive; they found it difficult to acknowledge that they could emerge from the Right. But New Left
scholars also neglected conservatism because, no less than the consensus historians they were challenging, they were in large
measure preoccupied with the Cold War and the liberalism they believed supported it.” 412
“New Left political scholarship has, therefore, generally been more interested in discrediting liberalism—and, within the
academic world, in wresting leadership and initiative from liberal scholars—than in confronting what it has generally
considered a less formidable foe: the self-proclaimed Right.” 412-413
“The organizational approach, therefore, tends to portray conservatism (when it considers it at all) in the same way it
considers other forms of dissent: as the futile, and dwindling, resistance of provincial or marginal peoples to the inexorable
forces of modernism.” 413
“American Conservatism is not easy to characterize…Conservatism encompasses a broad range of ideas, impulses, and
constituencies, and many conservatives feel no obligation to choose among the conflicting, even incompatible impulses, the
fuel their politics…Conservatism is not, in short, an “ideology,” with a secure and consistent internal structure. It is a cluster
of related (and sometimes unrelated) ideas from which those who consider themselves conservatives draw different elements
at different times…Still, conservatism is no more inchoate than liberalism, progressivism, socialism, or any other broad
political stance that describes a large and diverse groups of people.” 414
“Nor, prior to 1945, did American conservatives often constitute and effective political force, as the abysmal performance of
such organizational efforts as the Liberty League in the 1930s suggests. Not until the postwar era did large numbers of
conservatives manage to articulate a serious and important critique of liberal culture. And only in the 1970s did they begin to
make the critique the basis of an effective political 1970s did they begin to make that critique the basis of an effective
political movement by creating (among other things) a network of publications, think tanks, and political action committees
that have come to rival and often outperform their powerful liberal counterparts. Conservatism as an intellectually serious
and politically effective movement is, in short, a relatively new phenomenon—born of the frustrations of political exile in the
1930s and 1940s, the passions of the anticommunist crusades of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and perhaps above all the
political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.” 415
“A better explanation for the inattention of historians may be that much American conservatism in the twentieth century has
rested on a philosophical foundation not readily distinguishable from the liberal tradition, to which it is, in theory, opposed.”
415
“Indeed, the defense of liberty, the preservation of individual freedom, has been as central to much of American conservatism
in the twentieth-century as it has been to American liberalism. Many conservatives would argue that in the twentieth century
it has been much more central to their concerns than it has to the concerns of liberals.” 415
“What came to be known as “liberalism” in mid to late twentieth-century America has been to a significant extent a
conscious repudiation of the anti-statist elements of that classical tradition. It has been, instead, and effort to build the case
for a more active and powerful state (even if one in which ideas of individual rights played an important, often central role).
The anti-statist liberal tradition of nineteenth-century America has, therefore, increasingly become the property of those who
in the twentieth century are generally known as conservatives (or, as some of them prefer, libertarians).” 415-416
“Conservatism has been an important presence in every area of the United States. But the dramatic rise of the Right in the
last half-century may owe more to the West than to any other region.” 417
“Resentment of presumed domination by the East is one of the oldest themes in western American history. It has helped
produce the populist revolt of the late nineteenth century and periodic movements of social and economic protest since. In
the past half-century, moreover, many westerners have rechanneled the resentments that created populism—away from the
great private economic institutions that were created populism—away from the great private economic institutions that were
the traditional targets of western anger and toward the federal government, which many westerners believe has assumed the
intrusive and oppressive role that banks and railroads once played as the great obstacle to western freedom.” 418
“The federal government is the greatest landowner in the West. (It owns, for example, 44 percent of the state of Arizona, 90
percent of the state of Alaska). It controls an enormous proportion of the natural resources on which western economic
47
growth largely depends. Many of its environmental regulations impinge on western preferences and western enterprises
much more directly and severely than on their eastern counterparts.” 418
• “That intrusive federal presence has been particularly difficult for many westerners to accept, because it has coincided with,
and (According to many conservatives) obstructed, the West’s rise to economic eminence. In reality, the West’s rise to
eminence is itself in large part a produce of government largesse. Without the great federally funded infrastructure projects
of the twentieth century—without highways, airports, dams, water and irrigations projects, and other facilities the
government has provided—the economic development of the Southwest in particular would have been impossible. But few
western conservaties have show much inclination to confront such contradictions.” 418
• “The so-called neo-conservatives, most of them former socialists, began in the 1960s to embrace and promote a form of
normative conservatism in their effort to discredit the New Left…their denunciations of the radicalism and relativism of the
1960s, their calls for a relegitimation of traditional centers of authority, and their cries for a refurbishment of American
nationalism and a recognition of the moral claims of American democracy came increasingly to resemble the appeals of
other, more longstanding conservatives.” 422
• “The goals of the fundamentalist Right was to challenge the secular, scientific values of modern culture, values most liberals
have come to consider norms of modernity. Many liberals were, therefore, surprised and even baffled by the suddenly
powerful assaults on such symbols of “progress” as the secularization of popular culture, the teaching of evolution, even the
principle of the separation of church and state. Fundamentalists revived ancient quarrels over the banning of books and
movies. Some used religious arguments to frame positions on seemingly non-religious issues, claiming, for example, that the
Bible mandated a massive expansion of the American defense budget (an argument that Ronal Reagan, on occasion, seemed
to endorse). Others argued that biblical prophesies of the coming millennium should be a factor in the shaping of public
policy…Many mixed their religious fervor with an essentially secular fundamentalism, which rested on a normative view of
“traditional” middle-class constructions of family, community, and morality.” 423
• “Indeed, the most powerful single strain within fundamentalist conservatism through much of the 1970s and 1980s may have
been its assault on the efforts of modern feminists to redefine gender roles. Battles over abortion, birth control, the Equal
Rights Amendment, and other gender-based issues (and, more recently, battles over homosexuality) have mobilized the
fundamentalist Right more successfully and energetically than any other issue.” 423
• “The nature of the modern fundamentalist Right suggests, in short, that it has been possible to be a stable, affluent, middleclass person, to have become part of the modern bureaucratic world and to have embraced the consumer culture, to have
achieved and enjoyed worldly success, and to have clung nevertheless to a set of cultural and religious beliefs that are at odds
with some of the basic assumptions of modernism. And these possibilities serve as a challenge to the assumptions of most
historians that intense religious faith and fundamentalists morality should be understood as secondary or dependent
characteristics, products of economic or social maladjustment, to be discarded as their adherents move into the cosmopolitan
world.” 426-427
• “Much of the history of the postwar United States had been the story of two intersecting developments. One is the survival
of fundamentalist private values among people who have in other ways adapted themselves to the modern public world. The
second is the unprecedentedly vigorous assault on those values by liberal, secular Americans.” 427
• To study and leave out conservatism in the historiography “Is to admit that modernism is not yet truly secure; that, even in
America, some of the most elementary values and institutions of modern society still have not established full legitimacy
with a large, and at times politically powerful, segment of our population.” 429
Sources: Secondary
Connections: McGirr, Suburban Warriors, Goodman, Land, Lemann, Promised, Gerstle, American Crucible, Findlay, Magic, Avila,
Popular, Segrue, Origins of an Urban Crisis, Self, American Babylon, Jackson, Crabgrass, Chafe, Civilities, Powe, The Warren
Court, D’Emilio, Lost Prophet, Oropeza, Raza Si!, Sanchez, Becoming, Gutierrez, Walls, Jacobsen, Whiteness, Foley, White Scourge,
Davies, From Entitlement, Kruse, White Flight, Edsall, Chain Reaction, Oshkinsky, Worse than Slavery, Litwak, Trouble in the Mind
Heather Thompson, “Rescuing the Right,” Reviews in American History 30 (2002) 322-332
Argument: Lisa McGirr gives due respect to conservatism in her work, Suburban Warriors
• “Suburban Warriors opens with a direct challenge to previous understandings of American conservatism as “fringe” or
“marginal.” While Lisa McGirr concedes that such a view of the Right was thoroughly logical to those “consensus” scholars
of yesteryear who assumed that New Deal liberalism was the natural stick by which all other ideologies should be measured,
she insists that this perspective reflected mere wishful thinking. Explicitly rejecting the now decades-old analysis of
conservatism espoused by the likes of Richard Hoftstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, McGirr argues that right-wing
ideology actually became mainstream over the course of the 1960s, and became an extremely powerful force in American
politics in the years after that.” 323
• “She is, however, one of the first to do so through a close examination of the ideas and actions of the most ordinary
Americans who gravitated to conservatism. Indeed, this is one of McGirr’s most notable contributions to the existing
historical literature on the American Right. Traditionally this “history from the bottom up” approach to studying the past has
been utilized primarily by those who seek to understand the ordinary forces at work against American conservatism. In
adopting this methodology to examine conservatism itself, McGirr greatly expands our collective wisdom about the postwar
Right.” 323-324
48
“As McGirr’s social history of postwar conservatism unfolds, readers are introduced to the numerous men and women
who either originated from, or migrated to, the quasi-frontier oasis of Orange County, California, and then set about turning it
into a haven for the Right.” 324
• “According to McGirr, it was this altogether unremarkable group of conservative suburbanites that both catapulted Barry
Goldwater into the national political limelight, and then assured Ronald Regan’s gubernatorial victory in California.
Ultimately, McGirr notes, these California conservatives, in concert with Americans like them all across the country, were
also the ones to hand Reagan the presidency in 1980.” 324
• “It quickly becomes clear in Suburban Warriors, for example, that Orange County conservatives were anything but the
poorly educated, overly anxious, and status-obsessed misfits that “consensus” scholars imagined them to be. Significantly,
the conservatives in McGirr’s study are all upwardly mobile, white, educated members of the American middle class, and
their reasons for being conservative seem far from irrational or “kooky.” According to McGirr, conservatism made sense to
Orange County residents because it resonated with their own life experiences. For example, these particular Californians
were highly successful both economically and professionally, and thus, McGirr suggests, they naturally believed in the power
of the individual and disliked any incursion of the state into the personal lives of its citizenry. In addition, she argues, the
isolated and decentralized locale of the American West where these conservatives lived itself fostered and reinforced a
hostility to “liberal Washington intellectuals” since it often seemed as if those in the East were completely disinterested in the
needs or opinions of westerners. And yet, according to these westerners, those “distant elites” repeatedly tried to legislate
their lives (166).” 324
• “But McGirr is not content simply to illustrate that America’s conservatives were far more politically untied than we might
have thought (and of course more economically successful, more emotionally stable, and more ideologically rational). She
also wants to prove that they were more numerous, more politically active, and more instrumental, than we have really
appreciated. To do this, McGirr explores the grassroots organizing and activism that brought individual moms and dads in
California to the politics of conservatism and also allowed them to forge a mass movement.” 325
• “She is quite clear that extremist groups such as the John Birch Society directly shaped Orange County’s grassroots
conservative movement in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. And, McGirr argues, it was just this sort of virulent
conservatism that led Orange Countians to put all of their energy into trying to elect Goldwater president in 1964.
Significantly, however, she does not argue for the ultimate triumph of extremist views in Orange County. Quite the contrary,
McGirr wants to make the case that extremism died when the Goldwater campaign did. As she sees it, when Orange
Countians were forced to reckon with the humiliating electoral defeat of their man Goldwater, they decided to break their ties
to extremism. This, in turn, placed them firmly on the road to forging a more modern and more mainstream conservative
movement—the one that would inherit the future, according to Goldwater’s defeat and the new opportunities brought about
the social turbulence of the decade, conservatives moved increasingly into the respectable mainstream” (186). And, such
respectability, McGirr claims, was necessary for conservative Republican Ronald Reagan first to win the governorship of
California and then to take his agenda into the White House itself.” 326
• “McGirr maintains that a conservative movement of ordinary Orange County men and women grew stronger from the 1950s
onward (evolving, of course, from a group unified by anti-communist zeal to a less extreme group mobilized around specific
anti-liberal initiatives), but her own evidence could add up to quite different, but equally possible, interpretation: perhaps
McGirr’s grassroots movement was always a far more politically contested entity than she recognizes.” 328
• “This brings us full circle back to those scholars who, nearly a decade ago, called upon academics to stop privileging the
history of the Left, or liberalism, over that of the grassroots conservatives who also shaped our postwar past. Over the last
ten years, historians of various right-wing groups have certainly met this call enthusiastically and, without question, they hae
dramatically furthered our understanding of American conservatism.” 331
• “Ironically, however, historians’ new dedication to the task of rescuing the history of the Right has rendered the
historiography of postwar conservatism too narrowly focused. By substituting focus solely on the ideology and activism of
the Left or of the liberals with a focus solely on conservatives, even our best new contributors to the historiography of
American conservatism are missing a golden opportunity to deepen our understanding of postwar politics as a whole. Our
task now, it would seem, is to reexamine our past and grapple not only with how those to the right, to the left, or in the
middle of the political spectrum acted and evolved on their own, but also in relation to one another. To accomplish this task,
we must view each of these constituencies as a contender for the future, and not a preordained inheritor of it. It will be many
a decade into the future before we can dispassionately assess who triumphed politically in the United States after 1980 or
what the myriad implications of that victory might be—either for the past or for our present.” 331
Connections: McGirr, Suburban Warriors, DeHart, ERA, Brinkley, “The Problem of Conservatism,” Kruse, White Flight, Cohen,
Consumer’s
•
Walter LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy: An Interpretation” The Journal of American History
Vol. 74 No. 3 (December, 1987) 695-717
Argument: “Imperial presidencies, weak congresses, and cautious courts, which have been endemic to modern United States foreign
policy formulation, appeared at the turn of the century. At the same time, the nation’s foreign relations became global rather than
continental; they were driven more by corporate than by agrarian interests, and they were tracked by telegraphs and airplanes instead
49
of by couriers and stage coaches. Those changes radically challenged the constitutional forms that had governed the continental
foreign policy for a century. Presidents and courts met the challenge simply and directly: they largely severed foreign policy from
traditional constitutional restraints by declaring that international and domestic relations could be dealt with separately. Actions in the
world arena were not unduly to affect liberties at home.” 696
• “As the first century of United States foreign policy had been characterized by landed expansion that involved many
Americans and occurred largely on contiguous territory, so next century’s foreign policy was to be dominated by economic
and military interests that involved relatively few Americans and was often carried out far from the North American
continent.” 702
• “The turn from Madison’s sensitivity for the delicate balance between power and liberty to NSC 68’s assumption that foreign
policy ends justify the means occurred not in the early days of the Cold War but between 1890 and 1920.” 696
• “The framers of the Constitution believed such a separation between foreign and domestic realms to be both artificial and
perilous. In their view, the inability of individual states to cooperate in foreign policy produced continual crises in the 1780s.
The effect was also reciprocal: The inability to control overseas trade, which could bring badly needed specie into the
country, and to protect the western settlements had produced explosive internal unrest. The Shays uprising in western
Massachusetts and the threat of western settlements leaving the confederation to join adjacent British or Spanish empires
dramatized the dangers.” 696
• “An equal peril, of course was that in establishing a central government capable of dealing with European powers, a monster
would be created that could also suppress individuals and states.” 696
• “Nothing contributed more directly to the calling of the 1787 Constitutional Convention than did the spreading belief that
under the Articles of Confederation Congress could not effectively and safely conduct foreign policy.” 697
• “Madison believed “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.
Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe,
the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” 697
• “Hamilton and Madison argued that the Constitution’s provisions could protect liberty at home while they also safeguarded
United States interests abroad. That belief later produced divisions between Federalists and Antifederalists. At no time,
however, did either side disconnect foreign and domestic policies: liberty and order at home led to effective overseas policy.”
• “The first presidents, moreover, never made two claims often heard after 1940: that the executive “may use whatever raw
power he had—monetary, diplomatic and military—in the national interest”; and that he held inherent powers as chief
executive and as commander in chief that “are beyond legislative control. No early President suggested that Congress was
significantly limited in the control it potentially had over assigned executive powers.” 699
• “The nature of United States foreign policy interests until the Civil War helps explained such presidential deference. Those
interests usually had two characteristics. First, they touched large numbers of Americans in ways that cut across various
economic interests and involved entire regions of the country. Second, they were not to be located on the other side of the
glob or in secret military installations but across the next river or mountain range where lands and ports claimed by Indians,
Mexicans, Canadians, or Europeans coveted. Those characteristics not only closely linked foreign policy with the immediate,
individual rights of Americans but also made large numbers of citizens aware of the link. They believed they were able to
shape the nation’s foreign affairs.” 699
• “Abraham Lincoln, then a young Whig congressman who disliked most of Polk’s Democratic program, warned that if the
president succeeded with his scheme to have a war by invading a neighboring nation, “see if you can fix any limit in his
power in this respect.” In Lincoln’s view, Polk, by taking away Congress’s right to the proper and informed exercise of its
power to declare war, had committed “the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions” feared by the Constitutional
Convention.” 700
• “The years from 1846 to 1861 were frenetic precisely because so many Americans believed the survival of their liberty and
property interests at home depended on following certain foreign policies. Polk first discovered that dangerous relationship
when he asked for funds to buy peace with Mexico. The House of Representatives responded with the Wilmot Proviso,
which prohibited slavery in any territory taken by a treaty with Mexico. The president, through ignorance or willfulness,
refused to see the link. “What connection slavery had with making peace with Mexico,” he wrote, “it is difficult to
conceive.” 700-701
• “A drive for Cuban annexation led by both northeastern and southern factions, new involvements in Central America, and the
application of the Monroe Doctrine’s principles to Hawaii, the question between 1846 and 1861 was not whether but when,
where, and how American expansion would strike next.” 701
• “The Dred Scott decision was a powder keg. If Roger B. Taney’s decision held, then (as Lincoln and others argued)
American expansion anywhere would automatically carry with it the expansion of the slave state interests. On that issue,
Stephen A. Douglas, who was determined not to allow his policy of rampant expansionism to be politically corrupted by the
Dred Scott decision, took a position that split the Democratic party. Into the breach moved Lincoln and the Republicans.
They were committed in the long run to overturning Dred Scott by making fresh appointments to the Supreme Court and in
the short run to containing the slave states by denying them annexation of Cuba.” 701
• “In late 1860, Lincoln slashed a knot tied in the 1780s by Madison and other founders. The newly elected (but not yet
inaugurated) president refused to allow expansion to be used to maintain a constitutional balance.” 701
50
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“The nation that emerged from the civil war had lost interest in landed expansion. William Seward’s success in
maneuvering the Senate into purchasing Alaska from Russia was accompanied by a congressional resolution opposing any
further acquisition of territory.” 701-702
“Since the Civil War, Americans had been simultaneously blessed and damned by their new industrial and mechanized
agricultural complexes—blessed in that the United States suddenly acquired wealth that made it the world’s greatest
economic power by the early twentieth century; damned in that the domestic market became so glutted with goods that prices
fell and unemployment rose. Out of that domestic crisis, which became dangerously acute during the long economic
depression of 1873 through 1897, arose new American interests in Asian, Latin American, and African markets, as well as
the military power needed to protect the developing overseas lifelines. The Spanish-American War and President William
McKinley’s dispatch of United States troops to the mainland of China in 1900 brought home to many Americans the
possibility that a constitution written in the age of horses and muskets might need altering to fit an era of transoceanic cables
and machine guns.” 702
“In 1890 the Supreme Court decided In re Neagle. The justices actually were ruling on the president’s power to provide them
with personal bodyguards…Declaring that the president could provide such protection, the Court by a 6 to 2 vote argued that
presidential duties were not limited to carrying out treaties and congressional acts according to their express terms but rested
on broad implied powers: “the rights, duties, and obligations growing out of the Constitution itself, out international relations,
and all the protection implied by the nature of the government under the Constitution.” With that decision, the Court
recognized immense and indefinite presidential power.” 702-703
“McKinley stretched the constitutional restrains on his power until they assumed an entirely new shape. During 1897 and
1898 he stopped several congressional attempts to “declare” war on Spain; than in April 1898 he led the way to war himself
and destroyed the Senate’s attempt to bind his hands with a resolution attached to the declaration of war that automatically
recognized the Cuban revolutionary regime…Six weeks into the war, United States territorial holdings suddenly moved
thousands of miles across the ocean when McKinley, uncertain that he could obtain the necessary two-thirds Senate majority
to pass a treaty of annexation of Hawaii, obtained the islands with a joint resolution requiring a mere majority in both houses.
The president unilaterally committed American forces and prestige to the distant Philippines, then moved to neutralize native
Filipino forces fired on United States troops.” 704
“McKinley used the outbreak of fighting to push the Philippine annexation treaty through a rebellious Senate by one vote. In
the Caribbean he treated newly conquered Puerto Rico as neither a state nor a full-fledged colony; for the first time in
American history, a treaty acquiring territory held out no promise of future citizenship. Cuba became a protectorate through
the Platt Amendment, which allowed Cubans to have the problems of day-to-day governing but the American government
holding the right of military and economic intervention whenever Washington officials desired.” 704
“Anti-imperialists expressed many objections, but their concern about the Constitution was primary. They did not believe
that the document’s powers could be stretched so far and used so broadly by the president without snapping fundamental
constitutional restraints and transforming the republic into a centralized colonial empire.” 704
“In the fast-changing realm of the Untied States foreign affairs, the Constitution was undergoing its own far-reaching
transformation between 1890 and 1905. One transformation could be described as a centrifugal-centripetal effect: as
American military and economic power moved outward, political power consolidated at home. The expansion of American
power abroad has historically had such a centripetal political effect, but with the possible exception of the early Cold War
years, never was it as striking as during the 1890 to 1905 era that ushered in modern American foreign policy. Not only did
McKinley and Roosevelt master Congress but, using the new telegraphic networks and exploiting their power as commanders
in chief to the full, the chief executives also pulled power into their own hands by minutely supervising the movements of
their military commands and by controlling information made available to the public.” 706
“The second historic transformation was a direct cause of Watterson’s “Caesarism.” That change resolved the terrible
tension emerging between the new foreign policy and the traditional Constitution by separating the two. Mahan’s “lion in the
path” was reduced not merely to a watchdog but to a chained kitten. In re Neagle forged the first link in that chain by
accepting the theory of inherent presidential power in international affairs. The Insular Cases created another link by
ratifying McKinley’s conquests and by allowing the United States government to rule the conquests as it saw fit. Theodore
Roosevelt further severed presidential powers from constitutional restraints when during 1904 and 1905 he ordered the
United States Navy to protect American interests in Santo Domingo by stopping an internal revolution. Roosevelt justified
his action by referring to unspecified “police” powers. He then signed a treaty giving his officers control of Santo
Domingo’s main revenue source, the customs houses. When the Senate rejected the treaty on the ground that it wanted no
part of a de facto Rooseveltian protectorate, the president circumvented the Senate’s constitutional powers by negotiating an
executive agreement. He justified that and other presidential actions with a “stewardship” theory: his “insistence upon the
theory that executive power was limited only be specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution or
imposed by the Congress under its Constitutional powers.”” 707
“Executive agreements were important in foreign policy at least as early as the 1817 Rush-Bagot pact that demilitarized the
United States-Canadian border. New, however, was the claim made by post-1897 presidents that the stewardship theory
allowed extraordinary enlargement of the powers of commander in chief overseas. New also was the extensive use of
executive agreements.” 707
51
“Unlike Lippmann, who viewed the period 1917 to 1920 as crucial because it proved that “the people” were incapable of
shaping rational foreign policy, Corwin believed the era was seminal because during those years a dangerously centralized
security state had been created.” 709
• “The Senate’s defeat of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan to join the World Court, the Neutrality Acts that restricted the
executive’s foreign policy alternatives between 1935 and 1939, and the president’s delicate handling of foreign economic
initiatives illustrated the turn that had occurred in the chief executive’s treaty powers, and powers as commander in chief.
But it was a short-lived turn. By 1940, as the spreading war threatened the United States, Roosevelt began recentralizing
powering the White House. Sometimes, as in the Lend-Lease legislation of 1941, he showed deference to Congress. More
often, as when he executed the destroyers-for-bases deal in 1940 or when he secretly ordered United States convoys for
British ships in 1941 and apparently even angled for German attacks on American vessels that would force the nation into
war, Roosevelt acted with little deference to congressional restraints. The centrifugal-centripetal effect again appeared, and
this time it was to have a long life.” 710
• “the Supreme Court handed down in 1936 the landmark decision that justified expansive presidential power in foreign affairs.
In United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation et al., the Court upheld the president’s right to prohibit the sale of
arms and munitions to specific belligerents in Latin America, especially because Roosevelt had done so pursuant to
congressional authorization.” 710
• “That the federal government’s “powers of external sovereignty” antedated the Constitution and came from the British king
in the Revolution; that therefore “federal power over external affairs [is] in origin and essential character different from that
overt internal affairs”; and that “in this vast external realm…the President along has the power to speak or listen as a
representative of the nation.” To emphasize the last point Sutherland declared that there is “the very delicate, plenary and
exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations—a power
which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress.” 711
• “Bipartisanship in foreign policy peaked between 1947 and 1950 when the process helped produce the Marshall Plan and
United Sates membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” 714
• “Diplomacy could not be separated from domestic politics: An emergency abroad could not be stopped at the water’s edge.”
• “Secretary of State Dean Acheson fought back with a blunt statement that would probably have surprised most of the
founders: “Not only has the President the authority to use the armed forces of the United States in carrying out the broad
foreign policy of the United States and implementing treaties, but its is equally clear that this authority may not be interfered
with by the Congress in the exercise of powers which it has under the Constitution.” 714
• “Another measure of presidential power was revealed when investigation showed that in 1930 the United States had made
twenty-five treaties and nine executive agreements, but by 1972 it had signed 947 treaties and 4,359 executive agreements.”
• “Acheson testified in 1971 that the 1936 case allowed the president to withhold any information from Congress if he believed
that it affected national security interests. Others argued that it allowed withholding information deemed important by the
executive to national security, even if the information was obtained without warrant through electronic surveillance of
defendants whose rights might be affected.” 715
• “As the Vietnam experience demonstrated, Congress had difficulty controlling presidential actions once troops were
committed to distant alliances and battlefields. To remedy that weakness, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973.”
Sources: presidential papers, aide papers, congressional minutes and legislation, secondary sources
Connections: Hoganson, Fighting, Young, The Vietnam Wars, Appy, Patriots, Herring, America’s Longest War, Kennedy, Freedom
from Fear, Leuchtenberg, FDR, LeFeber, America, Russia, LaFeber, The New Empire, Gaddis, Origins, Cold War
•
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (1963)
Argument: “I have emphasized the economic forces which resulted in commercial and landed expansion because these appear to be
the most important causes and results in that nation’s diplomatic history of that period.” Xxxi
• “This monograph attempts to examine the crucial incubation period of the American overseas empire by relating the
development of that empire to the effects of the industrial revolution on United States foreign policy.” Xxxi
• “that those historians who label this era as the Age of the Robber Barons or as the time when “Industry Comes of Age” are
correct, and that foreign policy formulators were not immune to the dominant characteristic of their time.” Xxxi
• “These themes suggest two conclusions implicit in this work. First, the United States did not set out on an expansionist path
in the late 1890’s in a sudden, spur-of-the-moment fashion. The overseas empire that Americans controlled in 1900 was not
a break in their history, but a natural culmination. Second, Americans neither acquired this empire during a temporary
absence of mind nor had the empire forced upon them.” Xxxi
• “In the eight years between Benjamin Harrison’s ascendancy to power in 1888 and the success of the next Republican
presidential nominee in 1896, the United States transformed its foreign relations…Gently urged by Harrison, Blaine, and the
McKinley tariff and then frightened by the economic and social maladjustments of the 1893-1897 depression, many of the
most powerful American industries began to believe that their survival depended upon the markets of the world.” 326
• “Renewed commercial and investment interests in the Far East, plus the flouting of open-door principles by the continental
European powers, forced the United States to change long-standing Asiatic policies, increase State Department support of
these interests, and reorder the list of the nation’s traditional friends and enemies.” 326
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“Major McKinley (a rank received for bravery in the Civil War) had early accepted Rutherford B. Hayes’s advice that a
thorough knowledge of the tariff was the key to a successful political career. In the 1880’s he became a leading spokesmen
on this issue, showing unshakable devotion to high tariff principles.” 328
“He had always been a close friend of the working man [William McKinley]…As Governor, McKinley had begun to
comprehend some of the same labor-management problems which troubled Walter Quintin Gresham. The Ohioan responded
by encouraging the formation of unions and whipping through the state legislature an industrial arbitration bill. This measure
proved somewhat effective in the strike-ridden years of 1894-1895. But when the threat of violent strikes began to spread
across the state, McKinley did not hesitate to order out in force the state militia, believing, as he remarked later, that when a
brigade met a division there would be no battle.” 329
“When he entered the White House in 1897, the depression surged on “entailing idleness upon willing labor and loss to
useful enterprises…McKinley had no intention of allowing the business cycles to take its course. One of the more striking
themes which emerged from his post-1896 speeches was his emphasis on the necessity for an active national government to
cooperate in friendly fashion with the businessman.” 329
“The President wanted to stimulate, not regulate. Production had to climb, financial stability had to be ensured, and markets
had to be found. Government could become a partner with business in achieving these objectives.” 330
“The President thought he had found the key to the doors of foreign markets in the formula of reciprocity.” 331
“At the first N.A.M. [National Association of Manufacturers] convention in 1895, McKinley outlined the perfect trade
program: “our own markets for our manufactures and agricultural products” and “a reciprocity which will give us foreign
markets for our surplus products.”…”The end in view always [should] be the opening up of new markets for the products of
our country.” After three months in office he could remark that “no worthier cause can engage our energies at this hour” than
the enlargement of foreign markets; these markets allow “better fields for employment, and easier conditions for the masses.”
“three obstacles to American economic prosperity—the Cuban revolution, the threatening situation in the Far East, and the
lack of adequate demand for the glut of American goods.” 333
“There were other indications that McKinley would pursue a militant foreign policy. Each new day of the warfare devastated
more American investments and trade. These investments had mushroomed to more than $33,000,000 since the conclusion
of the Ten Years’ War in 1878, United States trade had soared to new heights after the 1890 tariff had opened Cuban markets
to American flour and industrial goods and had made mainland consumers dependent upon the Cuban sugar grower. These
economic links, along with the inhumanities of the reconcentrado policies, added to the rising city that the revolution had to
end quickly. If Spain could not terminate the warfare, the United States would have to intervene.” 334
“After stating bluntly that Spain could never again subdue the island, the State Department demanded that somehow the
revolution must be immediately halted. The serious danger posed to American material interests (interests which were “not
merely theoretical or sentimental”) necessitated the immediate cessation of warfare. These material interests were more than
direct investments in, and trade with Cuba. The “chronic conditions of trouble and violent derangement” on the island, the
State Department warned, “keeps up a continuous irritation within our borders, injuriously effects the normal functions of
business, and tends to delay the conditions of prosperity to which this country is entitled.”” 335-336
“The administration decided on the twenty-fourth to send the armored cruiser “Maine” to Havana. The Spanish Minister
fully supported the decision to send the vessel. The ostensible purpose of the sailing of the “Maine” was to resume friendly
visits of American ships to Spanish ports. In the context of McKinley’s reaction to the Havana riots and Long’s maneuvering
of the fleet, however, the sending of the “Maine” was an attempt to discourage future outbreaks on the island and to provide
notice of the administration’s concern over the inadequacy of the Spanish reforms.” 344
“The McKinley administration continued Olney’s attempts to open new areas of China for American merchants and
missionaries. An important result of this policy was the first movement of American missionaries into the rich Hunan
province in 1897. In the long report to Washington, Denby reiterated his belief that the trader would follow the missionary
into Hunan, listed limitless economic possibilities of the province, but strangely neglected the religious significance…” 352
“On November 18, 1897, Germany seized the key port of Kiaochow on the Shantung Penninsula. The seizure menaced the
large American exports flowing into Manchuria and North China through Shantung and threatened to set off a series of
European attempts to carve China into exclusive spheres of interest.” 354
“The threat of war with Spain in Cuba, combined with the dangerous threat to the open door in Asia, had constrained the
administration ot make thorough preparations for offensive operations in the Pacific.” 362
“Senator Frye told the National Association of Manufacturers’ annual convention on January 28, 1898, that, although the
home market was a great one, “four years ago we had a new teacher,” the depression, which taught Americans to undertake
“a determined advance and march upon the foreign market.” “The first market you are trying to propose to reach,” Frye
continued, “is the market in the Orient. You don’t propose to leave that to be closed against you.” In this context the
Nicaragua canal project and the annexation of Hawaii were crucial policy steps.” 366
“Finally, and most important, the United States had decided that its interests in the far Pacific could be preserved only if the
Hawaiian Islands were politically stabilized and if American naval and commercial holdings were freed from all foreign
threats.” 369
“By 1899 the United States had forged a new empire. American policy makers and businessmen had created it amid much
debate and with conscious purpose…Three years later it was rescued from a growing economic and political dilemma by the
declaration of war against Spain. During and after this conflict the empire moved past Hawaii into the Philippines, and, with
the issuance of the Open-Door Notes, enunciated its principles in Asia.” 417
53
Sources: papers, government records, speeches, NAM papers, diplomatic dispatches, State Department records
Connection: LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy,” Hoganson, Fighting, Young, The Vietnam Wars, Appy,
Patriots, Herring, America’s Longest War, Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, Leuchtenberg, FDR, LeFeber, America, Russia, Gaddis,
Origins, Cold War
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and PhilippineAmerican Wars (1998)
Argument: “Gender beliefs fundamentally shaped U.S. politics. Arguing that electoral politics should remain male terrain, opponents
of women’s suffrage frustrated efforts to win political equality for women. Besides keeping women on the sidelines of electoral
politics, gendered understandings of political power was associated with manhood, political leaders faced considerable pressure to
appear manly in order to maintain their political legitimacy. The ideas about gender that affected the allocation of political authority
also affected understandings of American democracy. Late-nineteenth-century Americans commonly believed that their political
system ultimately rested on manly character, something defined in different ways but generally in reference to contrasting ideas about
womanly attributes. This meant that policy-makers tried to legitimize their policies by presenting them as conducive to manhood.
The political pressure to assume a manly posture and appear to espouse many policies gave gender beliefs the power to affect political
decision-making. This book investigates how they helped lead the nation into war at the turn of the century.” 3-4
• “This book investigates the cultural roots of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars. It is based on the premise
that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding
cultures. In trying to understand why the United States went to war at the turn of the century, it is tempting to overlook the
cultural frameworks that shaped contemporaries’ outlooks and instead to focus on precipitating incidents, political and
diplomatic wranglings, closed-door meetings, and the like. But to focus exclusively on immediate causes is to skim the
surface of the past, to assume that earlier generations understood their world as we understand ours. To fully understand the
descent into war, we need to understand how contemporaries viewed the precipitating incidents, what seemed to be at stake
in their diplomatic and political wranglings, and what assumptions they brought to their high-level meetings—and to do that,
we need to understand something of their culture.” 2-3
• “But by stipulating social roles for men and women, gender beliefs have significantly affected political affairs. In the
nineteenth century, middle class Americans commonly believed that men and women had very different capabilities and
destinies. Men were thought to be well-suited for “public” endeavors, chief among them politics, and women for the
“private” realm of family and home. This is not to say that gender beliefs were universally agreed upon or that they went
unchallenged, but that most nineteenth-century Americans turned to inherited ideas about gender to order their world.
Although they differed on the details of male and female natures and spheres, most nineteenth-century Americans agreed that
there were important differences between men and women and that these should affect individual identities, social practices,
and political organization.” 3
• “It was, indeed, a fairly popular one [war]. More men tried to volunteer than the armed forces could accept; contemporary
observers exulted that the war had “brought us a higher manhood” and “compelled admiration for American valor on land
and on sea.” 6
• “Following the armistice, Spain and the United States sent delegates to Paris to negotiate a peace treaty. The final draft
stipulated that Spain would relinquish sovereignty over Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the United
States.” 6
• “In addition to taking the territories ceded by the peace treaty, the United States occupied Cuba from 1898 to 1902. A
measure introduced in Congress in 1901 by the Connecticut senator Orville H. Platt spelled out the terms for U.S.
withdrawal. The so-call Platt Amendment stipulated that the United States could intervene to preserve Cuban independence
or maintain a stable government. Realizing that acceptance of the amendment was a precondition for self-government,
Cuban leaders included its provision in their constitution, thereby leaving their nation vulnerable to future interventions, the
first of which came in 1906.” 6-7
• “The irony is hard to miss. After entering the Spanish-Cuban War with loud proclamations of its humanitarian and
democratic objectives, the United States refused to cooperate with the Cuban revolutionaries and ended up fighting another
war halfway around the world to deny independence to Filipino nationalists.” 7
• “But they did agree that war had redeeming social implications, chief among them that it would bolster American manhood.
What brought jingoes together was a shared enthusiasm for war, predicated on common gender assumptions.” 8
• “On the one hand, gender served as a cultural motive that easily lent itself to economic, strategic, and other justifications for
war. On the other, gender served as a coalition-building political method, one that helped jingoes forge their disparate
arguments for war into a simpler, more visceral rationale that had a broad appeal. As both motive and method, gender helped
men from different regions, parties, and walks of life to come together to form a powerful political movement.” 8-9
•
“Jingoes did not hesitate to phrase economic, political, and other arguments in gendered terms.” 9
• “To start with the economic and annexationist arguments, jingoes often claimed that the nation needed overseas markets and
territories in order to provide an outlet for men’s robust energies. In addition to promising material gains, expanded markets
and colonial holdings seemed attractive as a means of preventing American men from falling into idleness and dissipation
and enabling them to meet the basic male obligation of providing for their families, something that many men found
themselves unable to do during the depression of 1893-1897. Economic and annexationist arguments reflected convictions
about what it meant to be manly; their persuasiveness relied on a commitment to fostering manhood in the United States.
Some advocates of assertive politics undoubtedly regarded Cuba primarily as an opportunity for markets or as a choice piece
54
of real estate, but those who held that a war—any war—would be good for American men also saw it as an opportunity to
build manhood. To these jingoes, the prospect of combat enhanced Cuba’s allure.” 9
• “Besides providing a richer cultural context for economic and annexationist arguments, adding gender to the picture can help
explain why, rather than regarding the United States as a beacon for the world, as earlier generations of American foreign
policy theorists had done, late-nineteenth-century strategists advocated a more active and aggressive role for the nation.”9
•
“A look at the press coverage of the Cuban revolution suggests that gender also can illuminate the substantial humanitarian
sympathy for the mixed-race Cubans, a surprising development given the racist sentiments common among white Americans
in the late nineteenth century. In accounts of the Cuban revolution published in the United States, positive gender
convictions often counterbalanced negative racial ones, thereby fostering sympathy for the Cuban cause. American
correspondents frequently depicted Cuban women as pure and virtuous victims of Spanish lust and Cuban men as chivalric
fighters who had proven their manly character and hence capacity for self-government in combat. Such accounts portrayed
Spanish soldiers as effeminate aristocrats, best embodied by their queen regent or boy king, or as savage rapists who lacked
the moral sensibility and self-restraint of civilized men. The Spaniards’ apparent lack of manhood seemed to indicate that
they were ill-suited to govern.” 11
Sources: newspapers, pamphlets, debates, congressional minutes
Connections: LaFeber, “The Constitution and United States Foreign Policy,” Young, The Vietnam Wars, Appy, Patriots, Herring,
America’s Longest War, Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, Leuchtenberg, FDR, LeFeber, America, Russia, LaFeber, The New Empire,
Gaddis, Origins, Cold War
David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996)
Argument: “In design, it [Parchman] resembled an antebellum plantation with convicts in place of slaves. Both systems used captive
labor to grow the same crops in identical ways. Both relied on a small staff of rural, lower-class whites to supervise the black labor
gangs. And both staffs mixed physical punishment with paternalistic rewards in order to motivate their workers. What this meant, in
simple terms, was the ability “to drive and handle niggers.”” 139
• “Parchman is the state penitentiary of Mississippi, a sprawling 20,000-acre plantation in the rich cotton land of the Yazoo
Delta. Its legend has come down from nay sources: the work chants and field hollers of the black prisoners who toiled there;
the Delta blues of ex-convicts like Eddie “Son” House and Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter; the novels of William Faulkner,
Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, and, most recently, John Grisham, who seem mesmerized by the mystique of the huge Delta
farm.” 1
• “White Southerners liked to believe that blacks did not much mind going to prison—that there was no shame to it, no loss of
status, no fear of what lay ahead. Not surprisingly…[whites] viewed Parchman as a smooth and simple extension of normal
black life: “They do the same work, eat the same food, sing the same songs, play the same games of dice and cards, fraternize
with their fellows, attend religious services on Sunday mornings and receive visitors on Sunday afternoons.”” 136
• “The black convicts took a rather different view. Their songs in Mississippi and Tennessee portrayed Long-Chain Charlies
as an evil man who stole their freedom and brought them despair.” 136
• “The convicts who reached Parchman with Long-Chain Charlie must have been surprised by what they saw—and what they
did not see: no walls or guard towers, no cell blocks or stockades. From the outside, it looked like a typical Delta plantation,
with cattle barns, vegetable gardens, mules dotting the landscape, and cotton rows stretching for miles.” 137
• “By 1915, Parchman already was a self-sufficient operation. It contained a sawmill, a brick yard, a slaughterhouse, a
vegetable canning plant, and two cotton gins.” 139
• “Well into the 1960s, Parchman hand-picked much of its cotton on the grounds that “the product is cleaner, the crop is picked
more completely, and a tired cotton-picking inmate is less likely to promote mischief than one who stands around watching a
machine do his job.” 225
• “Blacks came to Parchman as field workers and left the same way. That was their lot in life. Anything more was anathema
in a culture where white supremacy and unskilled Negro labor went hand in hand. In Mississippi, rehabilitation was a
dangerous word.” 224
• “The end of racial segregation, for example, led to a surge of gang activity in the cages, as white and blacks squared off to
protect themselves, boost their status, and gain territorial control. Integrating a prison was not like integrating a high school
or a restaurant, a Parchman official complained: “In most cases we are dealing with the scum of the earth…Power is the
game. It is won in two ways: by physical force and by appeals to the worst prejudices.” 250
• “The number of homicides dropped as civilian guards took the place of gun-toting trusties. Yet in an odd way, the federal
court had shifted the balance of terror from the keepers to the inmates—from Black Annie and trusty-shooters to homemade
weapons and prison gangs.” 250
• “Following Gates, the great bulk of Parchman’s prime land—more than 13,000 acres—was leased to local growers. The
prison no longer fed and clothed its inmates with home-grown crops. The once-profitable, self-sufficient plantation
disappeared. Nothing fully took its place. Prison support jobs, such as maintenance and cooking, did not provide inmates
with nearly enough work. Well-intentioned efforts at adult education and vocational training were poorly funded, and
attempts to create small prison industries ran into strong opposition from competing private firms. The result was too many
convicts with too little to do.” 250-251
Sources: Mississippi prison records, court records, interviews, journals
55
Connections: Litwack, Trouble, Lemann, Promised, Goodman, Land of Hope, Payne, I’ve Got the Light, D’Emilio, Lost Prophet,
Chafe, Civilities, Litwack, Been in the Storm
Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998)
Argument: “The most intense years—the focus of this book—were between 1890 and the Great Migration, but the seeds had been
planted in the forcible overthrow of Reconstruction in the 1870s, and the Age of Jim Crow would span more than half a century. This
is the story of how the first generation born in freedom, more questioning of their “place” and less inclined to render absolute
deference to white, encountered (and in a certain sense helped to provoke) the most violent and repressive period in the history of race
relations in the United States.” Xiv
• “When black Southerners in 1865 staked out their claims to becoming a free people, they projected a very different vision of
the future. They aspired to a better life than they had known, to a life once thought impossible to contemplate. They wanted
what they had seen whites enjoy—the vote, schools, churches, legal marriages, judicial equity, and the chanve not only to
work on their own plots of land but to retain the rewards of their labor.” Xiii
• “But any experiment in biracial democracy was bound to be perilous. Neither military defeat nor the end of slavery
suggested to whites the need to reexamine racial relationships and assumptions. Confronting a society “suddenly turned
bottom-side up,” the white South responded with massive resistance. The language white employed to describe
Reconstruction, the methods used to subvert the Radical governments and black voting, and the determination to indoctrinate
future generations with the idea of Reconstruction as a “tragic era,” betrayed white fears that this experiment might actually
succeed in restructuring the South and racial relationships. Whites employed terror, intimidation, and violence to doom
Reconstruction, not because blacks had demonstrated incompetence but because they were rapidly learning the uses of
political power, not because of evidence of black failure but the far more alarming evidence of black success.” Xiii
• ““Jim Crow” had entered the American vocabulary, and many whites, northern and southern, came away from minstrel
shows with their distorted images of black life, character, and aspirations reinforced.” xiv
• “But by the 1890s, “Jim Crow” took on additional force and meaning to denote the subordination and separation of black
people in the South, much of it codified, much of its still enforced by custom and habit.” Xiv-xv
• “This book will draw largely from the perspectives and experiences of people who spent their lives in relative obscurity, who
never shared the fruits of affluence, who never enjoyed power. This is the story of what they confronted, how they struggled,
worked, tried to educate themselves, and found ways to temper their accommodations to the new racial order. And it is the
story of what happened to their aspirations and expectations. This is not much a study of black leadership and ideology as it
is a story of daily struggles by black men and women to wrest some meaning and value out of their working lives. It is less a
study of the institutional life of blacks than of the experience of being black in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury South.” Xv
• “This is no easy history to assimilate. It is the story of a people denied the basic rights of citizenship in the land of their birth,
yet fully expected to display as much patriotism as their white brethren, who enjoyed the full exercise of such rights. It is the
story of a people stamped as inferior, based on the idea of race, yet fully expected to provide the basic labor of the South even
as they complied with the perverse etiquette of Jim Crow.” Xv-xvi
• “Violence and the fear of violence helped to shape black lives and personalities.” Xvi
• “What helped to sustain them through bondage and a tortured freedom had been a rich oral expressive tradition, consisting of
folk beliefs, proverbs, humor, sermons, spirituals, gospel songs, hollers, work songs, the blues, and jazz. Through a variety
of expression, black men and women conveyed not only their disillusionment, alienation, and frustration, but also their joys,
aspirations, triumphs, and expectations; they used such expression both to confront their situation and to overcome and
transcend it.” Xvii
• “The black community was divided over strategies of accommodation and resistance; over aspirations, priorities, and
perceptions of whites and themselves; and along lines of class and color. Throughout their history in this country, they were
also divided over how to designate themselves as a people.” Xvii
• “Through the first four decades of the twentieth century, the essential mechanisms, attitudes, and assumptions governing race
relations and the subordination of black Southerners remained largely intact. The same patterns of discrimination,
segregation, unequal justice, and racial violence persisted. Sporadic breakthroughs were made by individual blacks, and the
New Deal injected a measure of hope, but the great mass of black men and women in the South still lived out their lives in a
severely restricted, isolated, and relatively static world. More than a million black Americans fought in World War II, as
they had in World War I, to make the world safe for democracy. After the war, even larger numbers developed new
strategies and tactics to make the United States safe for themselves. On some new battlefields—Montgomery, Selma,
Birmingham, Jackson, Little Rock, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles—still another struggle would be waged over the
meaning of freedom.” Xvii-xviii
Sources: songs, journals, newspapers, civil rights groups, books, art
Connections: Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery, Lemann, Promised, Goodman, Land of Hope, Payne, I’ve Got the Light, D’Emilio, Lost
Prophet, Chafe, Civilities, Litwack, Been in the Storm