Farewell to Prosperity: Wealth, Identity, and Conflict in Postwar America

Preface

ix Preface Money and race have composed the master narratives of American history. But the civil rights impulse of the past fifty years with its vigorous supporting scholarship has elevated the importance of the latter while unwarrantedly eclipsing the central place of the former.1 Yet it was the demands of a capitalist order grounded in a money economy run by white male Protestants that until quite recently made racial (and many would argue gender) oppression so attractive and, in some cases—and in one region—imperative. From the outset,life in the United States has been defined by a blind embrace of business and commerce, a rabid quest for wealth, and a persistent economic overreach enveloped in a widespread obsession with evangelical religion and personal salvation .Now as in all our yesterdays a Protestant ethic equating material success with godly favor exerts a powerful hold over the national psyche. Needless to say, not all free-market practitioners have been active churchgoing Christians; not every churchgoing Christian has been preoccupied with moneymaking in a free-market environment. But each commitment has more or less sanctified the other, blending into a powerful if informal ideology that shaped American thought and practice through three centuries of continental and industrial expansion.Not until the unprecedented domestic and foreign upheavals of the 1930s and ’40s did a powerful competing impulse emerge,secular in nature and emphasizing social justice,welfare,and,above all,security.A subsequent postwar prosperity almost effortlessly achieved ultimately crashed in ruins because of the frantic efforts of first liberal and then conservative extremists to impose their visions of the proper life upon America. As a harder era has come upon the land, they remain in often fruitless deadlock. In the following pages I have attempted to recover what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger in another context called the “form,motion and color”of a distinct era in our past that is now beginning to recede into perspective, while seeking to tie its trends and events into some sort of coherent whole.2 I have presumed to approach the task from the broadest considerations of political culture, looking at those dynamic and interlocking forces that in the words of Charles E. Rosenberg create “the emotional coherence of a . . . generation.Those ideas x Preface and values that shape and sanction” public life in a particular time and place, defining “the style in which” that public life “should be lived.”3 Hundreds of people I have encountered over seven decades— military folk, academics, diplomats, bureaucrats, acquaintances from a midwestern Middletown upbringing, social workers, and the denizens of trailer-park America among them—have helped form my approach to this work. I am grateful to them all and to the several outside reviewers who provided valuable comments and criticisms.Insightful conversations over the years with David Mabon,Dannel McCollum,and Brad Eaton have also helped shape my thinking about our recent national past. My greatest debts,however,are to Harriet Dashiell Schwar,Annette Wenda, and Clair Willcox of the University of Missouri Press. My wife critiqued the entire manuscript with her professional historian’s keen eye for sins of omission and commission together with an editor’s sharp sense of grammatical and linguistic propriety. Annette Wenda carried the editorial process forward with the same professional care and meticulousness with which she has handled my earlier manuscripts. Whatever sins of omission and commission remain are solely my responsibility. Clair Willcox and his colleagues at the University of Missouri Press have over the past decade provided every conceivable support and encouragement. My gratitude for their continuing interest in my work cannot be measured. farewell to prosperity ...