Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 by James T. Patterson Read Free Book Online

Preface

    My title, Grand Expectations , tries to capture the main theme of this book, that the majority of the American people during the twenty-five or so years following the end of World War II developed ever-greater expectations about the capacity of the United States to create a better world abroad and a happier society at home. This optimism was not altogether new: most Americans, living in a land of opportunity, have always had great hopes for the future. But high expectations, rooted in vibrant economic growth, ascended as never before in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s, an extraordinarily turbulent decade during which faith in the wealth of the United States—and in the capacity of the federal government to promote progress—aroused unprecedented rights-consciousness on the home front. America's political leaders, meanwhile, managed to stimulate enormous expectations about the nation's ability to direct world affairs. More than ever before—or since—Americans came to believe that they could shape the international scene in their own image as well as fashion a more classless, equal opportunity society.
    I call this grand quest for opportunity at home a rights revolution. It affected all manner of Americans, including people who were disadvantaged—minorities, the poor, women, and many others—and who demanded greater access to the ever-richer society that was glittering around them. The quest resulted in significant and lasting improvement in the economic and legal standing of millions of people. No comparable period of United States history witnessed so much economic and civic progress. In this golden age it often seemed that there were no limits to what the United States could do both at home and abroad. 1
    Throughout these years, however, the revolution in expectations confronted stubborn forces that blocked the most grandiose of personal dreams. There were limits after all. In the postwar era, as before, social cleavages beset the United States, one of the world's vastest and most heterogeneous nations. Racial conflicts in particular polarized American life. Other long-standing divisions—of gender, region, religion, ethnicity, and class—grew increasingly glaring, especially in the 1960s. And frightening international tensions, anchored in a Cold War, lasted throughout the postwar years. These tensions inspired some creative statecraft, but they also nourished extremes, such as McCarthyism, and they provoked terrible blunders, notably vast escalation of war in Vietnam. Both the internal divisions and the blunders aroused dissension and enlarged the gap between what people expected and what they managed to accomplish.
    Many of the grand expectations survived the turbulent 1960s; activists for environmental protection and women's rights, for instance, achieved considerable visibility in the early 1970s. Also surviving, however, were strongly held traditional ideas: faith in the virtue of hard work, belief in self-help and individualism, conservative religious values. Popular doubts intensified about the postwar rise of large, centralized government. The rights revolution, moreover, helped to stir backlash from people who resented what they considered to be the demands of groups for special privileges. And the Vietnam War widened a "credibility gap" between what America's leaders said they were doing and what in fact they were doing. This gap, already profound by 1968, grew enormous when President Richard Nixon tried to cover up the involvement of his aides in the scandal of Watergate. These events deepened a popular distrust of government—and of elites in general—that in varying forms has lasted to our own times.
    The economy, a driving force behind the rise of expectations from 1945 to the late 1960s, also developed worrisome problems by the early 1970s. These problems—which stymied economic growth in the mid- and late 1970s—did not destroy either the grand expectations or the