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1 Introduction A New Measure of America? This is the richest and most powerful country which ever occupied the globe. The might of past empires is little compared to ours. Lyndon Johnson, 1965 A nation is more than a political entity; it is a state of mind. Benedict Anderson The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, which determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, social scientist Lee Coleman wrote a short essay (“What Is American?”) in which he analyzed “alleged American traits” and ideals most often mentioned in books, articles, and speeches throughout the country’s history. Coleman listed America’s democratic tradition, republican form of government, pioneer and frontier spirit, individualism, and belief in liberty, equality, and mobility. Secondarily , in a darker vein, he noted Americans’ conformism and materialism.1 The United States has always fancied itself as a nation apart—an “exceptional ” nation, and, with more than a touch of hubris, the world’s greatest nation. Tom Paine famously wrote in The Rights of Man that “the case and circumstance of America present themselves as the beginning of a new world.” Yet most leaders from the eighteenth century until World War II focused on the idea that America and American identity were the unique products of a liberal idealism rooted in the thought of John Locke and articulated by Jefferson, Madison, and the other founders. As Louis Hartz argued in his influential Eisenhower-era book, The Liberal Tradition in America, America was conceived from a platonic, liberal ideal whose intellectual progenitor was Locke. The founders were lionized as demigods who had crafted a “new order of the ages.” The United States—according to Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and other commentators hearkening back to I NT R ODUC T I ON 2 Alexis de Tocqueville—came into being through a moderate and measured revolution, was deeply pragmatic, and was concerned with constant improvement of the technical means of achieving progress.2 However, when Coleman wrote—and before—many commentators also offered variations on the theme that America was a land of plenty . The United States stood head and shoulders above other countries in its abundant resources, productive capacity, economic opportunity, and potential to achieve unimaginable wealth. America had long seen itself as the land of opportunity, defined by individuals’ ability to start anew and not be hindered by entrenched political, social, and economic barriers. Americans also had long boasted about the nation’s productive powers—from the Lowell mills to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to Ford’s River Rouge plant in the 1930s. Such ideas of America as a Silverado of riches had been paired with and supported by a Jeffersonian/Jacksonian faith in liberty and equality, as well as by a geographical frontier unbounded at least until the end of the nineteenth century. It was in this more timeless sense of “plenty” and potential abundance that dreamers and promoters believed—as far back as Coronado’s quest five hundred years ago for the Seven Cities of Gold and the seventeenth -century Virginia Company’s promises of gems hanging on trees— as did sophisticated commentators from Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner in the nineteenth century to Brooks Adams and David Potter in the early to mid-twentieth.3 Within a few years of World War II’s end, however, abundance was no longer a timeless, abstract idea but rather a dynamic, measurable concept of rising economic output and living standards. Opportunity and the chance to escape old world (or third world) poverty were quite different from an emerging belief that America’s purpose was ineluctably to produce and provide its people with more goods. Likewise, abundance was no longer so much a neutral description of plenitude as a patriotic celebration of much that was right with America. Prosperity, the pursuit of economic growth, and national greatness went hand in hand. The United States was quantitatively rich and had been made rich by its economic system, which—people were told—distinguished the United States from other countries and was central to its identity. Beginning in earnest in the postwar era, opinion-shaping elites in politics , business, academia, media, schools, and public diplomacy gloried in America’s ever-growing economy as the “measure of the nation.” Thanks to new national income accounting and other economic data-collection...

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