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Introduction After the Good War On May 8, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, having accepted the surrender of Nazi Germany, made the following announcement: “The mission of this allied force was fulfilled at 0300, local time, May 7th, 1945.”* On August 15 of that year Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific theater, having confirmed the surrender of Imperial Japan, sent the following message to all units: “Orders have been issued to the Pacific Fleet and to other forces under the command of the Commander in Chief US Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean areas to cease offensive operations against the Japanese.” With such terse, unadorned , workmanlike communications, American commanders told the world that the great task had been accomplished. The Axis threat had been ended, and final victory had been achieved. Now it was time to go on with the future. V Was for Victory. This was the title John Morton Blum chose for his classic study of the World War II American home front. The past tense is telling. One feels the sense of completion and closure. For Americans on all fronts it was time for life to go forward; and go forward it would, as Lewis Lapham has written, into new dimensions of national possibility undreamed even by the most visionary of the founders: “In 1945, *Albert D. Chandler, ed., The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Baltimore: 1970), vol. 4, 2696. 2 / Introduction the United States inherited the earth,” wrote Lapham; and “what was left of Western civilization passed into the American account.” Further, “the war had also prompted the country to invent a miraculous economic machine that seemed to grant as many wishes as were asked of it. The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God.”* In one form or another, such were the basic majority of attitudes for Americans of the postwar era where the new visions of promise attending the great triumph became portals to an ever-extending future, a golden age of American peace and plenitude that to a great degree has never ended. To be sure, for large numbers of post-1945 Americans the idea of the Good Life after the Good War remains decidedly problematic; most notably for blacks and women, it was hardly a uniform or even a majority experience, then or now. Nor, it might be added, even on the part of white males of the victory generation, can one avoid at significant moments a sense of the almost unbearable sadness of postwar American life in general as represented, for instance, in domestic novels by returned veterans such as James Jones’s Some Came Running, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, or Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. Still, the concept continues to shape both personal memory and cultural reflection. To put it simply, many Americans who, like me, came of age during the second half of the twentieth century will always find it difficult to think of themselves as anything but inheritors and beneficiaries of the post–World War II culture of victory. For us the facts will remain that, in outlook, education, and security, in moral energy and social and political opportunity, a lot of us had a head start on the rest of the world. To cite the reflections of a friend and contemporary I read recently, we all felt somehow as if we had been “part of a great triumph.” Accordingly, the world of our formative experiences seemed imbued with a “pervasive sense of calm, confidence , and relief.”† He gets it just right, I think. The world had been saved somehow. The future was ours to build. And we all knew who had laid the foundations for us. It was our parents and aunts and uncles— *Lewis Lapham, “America’s Foreign Policy: A Rake’s Progress,” Harper’s, March 1979. Quoted in Studs Terkel, The Good War (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 8. †John Northrop, executive director, Alabama School of the Fine Arts, Birmingham, AL, ASFA Applause Newsletter, Nov. 2007, 2. After the Good War / 3 our postal carriers and electricians and teachers and bookkeepers—the people who had fought and won the Good War and in the process had earned for themselves the title of the Greatest Generation. Along with them, in spirit and energy, we felt the glow of victory in World War II...

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