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  • Forging Consensus
  • Doug Rossinow (bio)
Wendy L. Wall. Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi + 378 pp. Photographs, illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Ever since John Higham, in 1959, criticized what he labeled “the cult of the ‘American consensus,’” historians and other intellectuals have understood that the invocation of uniform values that bind together inhabitants of the United States can be misleading.1 Reference to a consensus might divert attention from important disagreements. Assertions that a consensus existed might be as much prescriptive as descriptive. Higham didn’t call it a cult for nothing. But the essential point was conveyed with the quotation marks he put around the term “American consensus.” That concept, early in its career as an object of scholarly reflection, was understood as, to use today’s term, a “construction.” Higham remarked, a few years later, that “consensus” delineators among interpreters of U.S. history, such as David Potter and Louis Hartz, were “conservative,” suggesting their work was more political than it may have appeared. He also noted that consensual narratives of the American past had “much in common with our national mythology,” a source of their imaginative power.2 He did not say that mythology was false. But the word suggests a partial truth: partial both in the sense of leaving certain things unsaid and in the sense of partisanship. Mythology is a type of truth that does a special kind of cultural work.

In her intelligent new book, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement, Wendy L. Wall examines a series of efforts to project a perception of consensus in American society around basic values, starting in the late 1930s and leading up to the mid-1950s—the time when historians of the United States got in on the game in earnest. She doesn’t analyze the consensus scholars whom Higham criticized. I mention them because they spring to mind in any discussion among American historians about mid-century efforts to construct the idea of an American consensus. Wall explains how a different and diverse groups of actors, including business executives, government officials, and progressive intellectuals, tried to do different kinds of work with the “mythology” of American unity. It is not [End Page 449] news that the United States was a diverse and sometimes divided society, in the early twentieth century, the mid-twentieth century, or any other period. It has been a long time since historians took the thesis of “consensus” seriously as a description of a conflict-free national history. The idea that an “American way,” revolving around a social-values consensus, was a “construction” is not shocking. Wall does not dispel naïve preconceptions when she shows that the mid-century ideal of a unifying “American way” was somewhat imaginary and that different groups projected this ideal in different ways to advance different agendas. However, she has done a fine job of excavating evidence of precisely who was doing so at different moments from the 1930s to the 1950s. Moreover, she clearly and effectively analyzes the important points of difference between contending versions of the “American way.”

Convincingly, Wall begins her story before World War II, in the late 1930s. She sees public-relations campaigns to promote a centrist “American way” starting at that time, a response to the rise of fascism, to the ascendancy of the interventionist New Deal state and of organized labor, and to a general atmosphere of cultural crisis. (At least one scholar argues that the promotion of an “American way,” specifically conveying a consumerist definition of American citizenship, began well before the starting point of Wall’s narrative.3) Business groups such the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) wished to safeguard business prerogatives, and they initiated the “American way” campaign that Wall narrates. This effort quickly popularized the term “free enterprise” to describe a capitalist economy that promoted “class harmony and consumer prosperity—guaranteed by business, not by government” (p. 49). After World War II, such efforts continued, with business groups dubbing American capitalism “People’s Capitalism,” ostensibly...

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