America Transformed: Sixty Years of Revolutionary Change, 1941–2001 (review)

Although the Cold War figures into many of the themes of America Transformed, readers should not expect new interpretations of that conflict, nor much about the Cold War beyond Vietnam. Instead, Richard Adams, who has taught history at the University of California at Berkeley since the 1960s, has chosen to focus on eight developments in the United States from 1941 to 2001 which, he argues, constituted change of such magnitude and pace as to be called revolutionary. More provocatively, he argues that elites propelled most of these changes and that the top-down nature of the changes accounted for the counterrevolutions that emerged in the 1970s.

After a brief introductory section, Adams devotes separate chapters to each of his eight revolutions: the rise of an affluent society; the ascendancy to global dominance; the militarization of the nation; the concentration of corporate power; the transformation of race relations; the transformation of gender roles; the embrace of sexual permissiveness; and the weakening of privacy. Then, departing from his thematic organization, Adams examines liberalism and conservatism over the 60-year period, as he seeks to explain the backlash against the revolutions in antipoverty policy, race relations, gender roles, and sexual behavior. An acknowledged liberal, Adams in general presents the first half of his period in positive terms; thereafter he highlights a decline in the counntry’s commitment to the poor and disadvantaged, to equality for all groups, and to the moral high ground in foreign policy.

Adams’s discussion of affluence demonstrates the importance of the government’s hand in the postwar economic boom; explains Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in generally laudatory terms; describes the succeeding turn against taxes and government provision and the growth of income inequality; and points out that the attack on the welfare state ignored the welfare that government bestowed on corporations and agribusiness. In exploring the revolution that occurred in business, Adams looks not at new industries and technologies—though he acknowledges the importance of technology— but at the spread of multinational organizations and the conglomerate movement that intensified the tremendous power of megacorporations.

While acknowledging military and paramilitary interventions in other countries under Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, Adams presents liberal internationalism as a positive force in the world—until the misjudgments, deceits, and brutalities of the Vietnam War. Beyond Vietnam, the book is largely silent on foreign policy except for a stinging critique of the current war in Iraq. The book’s brief chapter on militarization discusses the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex and how the shift to an all-volunteer army in 1973 supposedly increased the influence of the military in the country.

Adams views more positively the revolutions in race relations, gender roles, and sexuality. Although he acknowledges the utter necessity of the black freedom struggle, his top-down framework of change leads him to concentrate on the courts rather than on the movement itself or on the civil rights legislation of 1964, 1965, and 1968. Adams documents the soaring labor-force participation of women in the postwar period, but he sees feminism primarily as a movement of upper- and middle-class women and does not mention the labor union women who raised sex discrimination issues in the 1950s and actively participated in the women’s movement itself. To illustrate the elite nature of forces behind the sexual revolution, Adams examines the work of Alfred Kinsey and the team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions on pornography and obscene speech. Parallel with his discussions of minority rights and women’s rights, Adams claims that the courts were often out in front of public opinion with regard to homosexuals’ rights.

The revolution in Americans’ regard for privacy is perhaps the most unexpected of Adams’s choices. In one of the freshest chapters, he documents the expansion of privacy rights under the Supreme Court headed by Earl Warren and the...