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It comes as no surprise to learn that the sentimental overlay on American culture did not survive the war. Never far from the surface, realistic portrayals of ordinary individuals and the social life of common people returned with a vengeance once the pressure of wartime conformity had subsided. This meant that liberalism and illiberalism again contested representations of democracy on a widespread basis as they had in the thirties. Norman Mailer, in The Naked and the Dead, his classic novel of World War II published in 1948, demonstrated this quite clearly. Mailer, a vet who had served in the Pacific theater, told a story about the war and the Americans who fought it that was completely at odds with the aspirations of the Office of War Information and wartime Hollywood. For Mailer, many of the American soldiers were actually men who manifested a limitless capacity for dominance and brutality both on the field of battle and at home. Raised in a society in which men struggled with each other for wealth and power, Mailer’s main characters were primarily illiberals, consumed with gaining the upper hand, and they would not hesitate to resort to cruelty to get it whether it was against the Japanese or women back home. Their attraction to dominance and brutality was naked and inbred, but it was the naked who survived and not the dead.1 Traditional American politics in the late forties was not as pessimistic as was Mailer about the nature of American men or about the competitive individualism nurtured by the American economic system. Rather, there was a general revulsion in political circles against many of the trends of the thirties and forties that had diminished the role of the individual for the sake of mass political mobilizations. Whether American leaders viewed mass movements like the New Deal that were intended to 87 WAR AND PEACE AT HOME THREE further economic democracy or National Socialism, which was designed to destroy both democracy and liberalism, the conclusion was widespread that a political future had to rest largely on a renewed sense of individual freedom and less organizational control. Arthur Schlesinger, in his classic political tract of 1949, The Vital Center, argued this point strongly, claiming that the key issue facing the United States at the time was not Soviet Communism but the “power of organizations over individuals.” Schlesinger actually exhibited some of Mailer’s pessimism by inferring that the war had undermined the assumption that men were “perfectible ,” but overall, unlike Mailer, he saw a way out. For Schlesinger, steeped in the framework of left/right politics, the political future had to be fashioned around a “vital center” or a blend of “the maintenance of individual liberties” and “the democratic control of economic life.”2 Postwar politics, like wartime politics, became essentially consensual. General agreement was expressed over the evils of communism, a stance that tended to reinvigorate positive idealizations of capitalism and individualism and reinforce disillusionment with mass political mobilizations . Moreover, the sacrifices of the thirties and of wartime had created a tremendous desire for consumer goods in their infinite variety. A “business-orchestrated” campaign to sell the “American way of life” after the war convinced Americans of all ranks that free enterprise and the protection of individual rights would be the best guarantees for social harmony and abundance. Historian Roland Marchand has explained that the postwar period was marked by a dream of a “classless prosperity” in which everyone in society could participate in consumption and leisure activities. Marchand was able to demonstrate, for instance, that this dream was fostered in part by the nationalization of American advertising and its message that past class affiliations were by no means permanent. Everyone was encouraged to realize personal dreams and the benefits of democracy and liberalism through consumer goods like automobiles and new suburban housing. Depression-era images of struggling workingclass families and militant labor organizations were being quickly put aside inside and outside the labor movement.3 The resurgent force of liberal and capitalist political visions was not good news for organized labor. Labor membership continued to increase in the thirties and forties, and workers had certainly gained a measure of respect during the war with their no-strike pledge, but in 1946 the initial instinct of large unions was to reassert their power and make up for sacri fices in influence and wages that they had made during the war. Led by auto workers in...

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