Surveying Postwar America-- On a Grand Scale

Despite being subjected to ritualized flogging for decades now, traditional narrative, largely political history endures. This book, winner of the 1997 Bancroft Prize and an entry in The Oxford History of the United States series, shows why. Authoritative, reasoned, nicely conceptualized, and well-written books, no matter how conventional, will always find an appreciative audience. In this case, that audience will be comprised of college lecture writers, graduate students, ambitious undergraduates, and however many thousands of the lay public prove willing to plow through an eight hundred-page book to learn something of their nation’s past.

For specialists, there is little that is original and nothing innovative or methodologically sophisticated in Grand Expectations. Yet even the well schooled will appreciate the (typically if not unerringly) balanced judgments, deft characterizations, and sheer command displayed in a synthesis based on the best secondary studies of the era.

Patterson’s argument—that Americans approached the postwar era with an unprecedented set of “grand expectations” about what they could accomplish at home and abroad—seems as sound as it is unexceptional. Victory on both fronts in World War II and a blazing economic recovery fueled high optimism in the first postwar generation. By the mid sixties, however, confidence began to wane in the wake of a series of polarizing developments. Longstanding divisions of gender, region, religion, ethnicity, and class overshadowed once confident aspirations of building a Great Society. Vietnam destroyed the illusions of Pax Americana. And stagflation undermined faith in perpetual economic growth. Defeat in Vietnam and the collapse of Richard M. Nixon’s imperial presidency marked the end of an era. Never again, it seems, would Americans have the faith in their own government and national destiny that they displayed in the “golden age” in which the nation’s prospects had once appeared virtually limitless (p. viii).

Americans were confident about the future despite the fears fostered by the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and world communism. Given “the uniquely difficult and bipolar world that suddenly arose after World War II,” Patterson writes, the Cold War was “as close to being inevitable as anything can be in history.” Attempting to strike a balance from a contentious historiography, the author blends nationalist and revisionist themes before ultimately tilting toward the former. Of Truman’s diplomacy, Patterson avers that a “defter administration might have coped more sure-handedly” with postwar world affairs. While Truman thus bears some responsibility for the “apocalyptic character” of the Cold War, “even more” responsible was “the peculiarly suspicious, dictatorial, and often hostile stance” of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (pp. 135–36).

Patterson employs the same formula in his analysis of the Korean War. He notes that Truman embraced a tyrannical regime in Seoul, spurred American militarization embodied in NSC 68, launched the ultimately disastrous commitment to Indochina, and made colossal errors in escalating the war north of the 38th parallel and in failing to sack Douglas MacArthur early on. Yet he simplifies the war itself as a product of “North Korean aggression” and concludes, despite the unfortunate consequences, that Truman ultimately “acted in the best interests of world stability” (p. 236).

Echoing a consensus view based on declassification of state documents over the past generation, Patterson avers that Dwight D. Eisenhower employed greater sophistication and subtlety in his handling of foreign affairs than did Truman. Ike’s diplomacy was not uniform, however, as reflected in his penchant for practicing nuclear blackmail and in leaving the “highly dangerous legacy” of commitment to Ngo Dinh Diem and “South Vietnam” (p. 298). While Eisenhower ultimately did seek to rein in Cold War excesses, Patterson explains that “the powerful anti-communist consensus that dominated American life in the mid-1950s . . . all but silenced counsels of restraint” (p. 291).

Patterson brilliantly analyzes the postwar Red Scare, which spread hysteria, fueled militarization, “constricted public life and speech,” and “helped tie a straightjacket of sorts on America’s foreign...