Introduction:
Preconditions of American Thought, 1945-68

The most salient fact about modern life, capitalist and communist, is the ideological commitment to social change. The United States is probably the first large society in history to have change and innovation “built into” its culture.

—Daniel Bell, An End to Ideology (1960)

We are changing so fast that the America of 1950, if we confronted it today, would seem like a junk shop or a flea market; it’s that far behind us.

—Bernard Muller-Thym (1967)

The history of pre-contemporary American cultural excellence takes the form of scattered bursts of isolated genius usually emerging from unlikely sources, such as a prosperous insurance salesman composing unpublishable and temporarily unperformable music in his spare time (Charles Ives), or an employee of the governmental Coast Survey whose extraordinary papers on philosophy were largely published, and honored, after his death (Charles S. Pierce). For this reason, the historian of our intellectual life commonly speaks of both the creative individual’s “alienation” from the dominant American culture and the absence, at the levels of excellence, of any continuities in time or relationships in space. “American art has differed in this respect,” wrote the critic Harold Rosenberg in the middle fifties, “that the triumphs of individuals have been achieved against the prevailing style or apart from it, rather than within or through it.” This absence of a sustaining tradition was at once America’s intellectual peril and yet its refuge, for our greatest minds became instinctive frontiersmen, doing their tasks alone, their most adventurous works leaping beyond the established (largely European) precedents in their respective arts; only a scant few had long careers of sustained, first-rank productivity. This background perhaps accounts for why American cultural produce at its best exhibits a rough-hewn, untutored, eccentric quality that impresses Europeans precisely for its innovative other-worldliness, as though they acknowledged that no European, no matter how hard he strived for originality, could have written Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, or The Making of Americans.

This kind of eccentricity, raised in isolation, characterizes top-level American thought at least to 1920, perhaps to 1940; for after World War II, the quality of cultural life in this country took a completely different shape. For the first time, in nearly every known intellectual field, there were figures and achievements commanding international respect, if not universal influence; so that American cultural endeavor as a whole had a breadth, a merit and a continuity unprecedented in its history. Culturally, America had arrived. In curious paradoxes, the same cultivated Europeans who condemned the vulgarity of America’s superficial appearance were now impressed by our art and thought, and the same European critics who vehemently despised American capitalism and its philistine public spokesmen often drew upon our thinkers for their own critiques, as even anti-Americanism around the world revealed the impact of American thinking. Intellectually as well as socially, American culture ascended to the precipice of history; so that forward-looking people in other countries, whether pro-American or not, were implicitly emulative.

This intellectual coming of age stemmed from a variety of causes, the most obvious being that any advanced industrial nation as populous as the United States is likely to produce considerable genius; but there were also sources within our particular history. The primary one was the development of a native intellectual self-consciousness—the increasing sense that the best cultural endeavors are sufficiently valuable to deserve public support. Among the forms that this obligation incurred in practice was the development of patronage, as much through individual donations as the growth of philanthropic foundations and then, in the 1960s, government agencies devoted to extensive cultural support. Further examples of this intellectual self-consciousness include the maturation of the scientific research facility—initiated by Thomas Alva Edison and epitomized since the 1920s by Bell Telephone Laboratories—which was formed for the collective organization of advanced knowledge and the generation of technological invention; so that many subsequent intellectual advances, particularly in the sciences, have occurred not in isolated workshops but within a corporate research environment. Indeed, the success of the government-sponsored Manhattan Project during World War II also set a precedent for such later “crash-programs” for intellectual-technological advance as thermonuclear weaponry, the first communications satellite, the moonshot, and an anti-polio vaccine. In addition, this greater organization of intellectual competence both causes and parallels the burgeoning expansion of knowledge, a less visible fact that is reflected most obviously in the sheer increase of published scholarship in every traditional field. As the gross volume of knowledge increases, the retrieval of appropriate information has become an increasingly more problematic procedure, if not an incipient social calamity, that has been alleviated only through the use of computers and other technologies of rapid information-processing.

This increasing cultural self-consciousness of American business parallels the government’s growing support of cultural work, reaffirming the precedent, established in the 1930s, that non-industrial talents should not be allowed to wither in the marketplace; and the John F. Kennedy administration, in many ways epitomizing this maturation, initiated the practice of awarding “Freedom Medals” and White House dinners for those who were genuinely the very best (rather than the most popular or the most powerful) in their respective cultural fields. Another major factor in this cultural change was the burgeoning growth of native university education, at first stimulated by certain provisions of the G. I. Bill of Rights and then by responses to the Russian success with Sputnik. This growth insured not only that cultural eminence in America would, for better and worse, be recognized by more and more people, but that intellectually influential individuals could earn upper-middle-class incomes just from academic research and/or lecturing to the young. Education and cultural produce both became, by the 1960s, expanding and primary elements of American enterprise; and the network of major universities became a “center,” so to speak, of our intellectual life.

Another historical cause, often forgotten, was the immigration here during the 1930s of many of Europe’s greatest artists and intellectuals, escaping from totalitarian regimes and collectively initiating a “brain drain” from which subsequent European cultural life has never completely recovered. The most commanding and adaptable of these refugees inevitably had a decisive influence upon American cultural endeavors, as much through their own work and their teaching as their personal example. Recent American painting and sculpture, for instance, clearly reflect the fact that Hans Hofmann, L. Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Archipenko, Marcel Duchamp, and Josef Albers had all settled here and not somewhere else. American sociology was indebted to Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Lewis Coser, and Hannah Arendt, most of whom came to the US in the late 1930s, as did Albert Einstein and John von Neumann, perhaps the two most consequential minds in modern mathematics; and the outer-space rocketry programs were indebted to scores of German-born scientists now residing here. (Indeed, there are reasons for suspecting that, were the Pentagon not so repelled by the presence of their former prominent antagonists, the U.S. could have launched a satellite years in advance of Sputnik.) Not only did most of these immigrants become U.S. citizens, but their cultural work would stand to the world as “American.”

These refugee intellectuals also made the best wager, for the United States emerged from World War II as both the most victorious nation and the only major power whose land and civilians did not suffer enemy attack. Its own military capabilities included atomic weaponry far more powerful than the bombs dropped upon Japan, in addition to long-range airplanes and rocketry. True, temporary misguided sympathy for Josef Stalin allowed Russian forces swiftly to subjugate most of Eastern Europe, encouraging further Soviet territorial ambitions which led, in turn, to a costly and frustrating “Cold War” that fortunately, and yet significantly, never escalated into “hot” bilateral battle. Repudiating a tradition of isolationism (conceived, in George Washington’s phrase, as “no entangling alliances”), the United States found itself initiating a network of mutual defense treaties—NATO, SEATO, the Baghdad Pact—with allies of varying degrees of avarice and loyalty. These commitments, as well as the availability of thermonuclear weaponry, forced American leaders to evolve, for the first time, an articulate strategy for dealing with international challenges. The “Truman Doctrine,” enunciated in 1947, committed the United States to defend all free states against “totalitarian” regimes. Recognition of the practical consequences of this promise prompted an evolution in American strategy during the 1950s away from “massive retaliation,” the threat of which failed to halt Communist incursions into Indo-China, to a militarily more modest scheme of “flexible response” to various levels of insurgence. The post-War revelation of Nazi atrocities, following upon the realization of how much America’s delay into WWII had cost Europe, also left Americans born before 1930 with guilty feelings over our earlier failure to intervene soon enough in the world’s troubles; yet by the 1960s, critics of U.S. foreign policy could justly make the contrary charge that expansion, or over-extension, of American commitments abroad was itself a primary cause of America’s troubles with the world.

In the post-War period, both superpowers initiated the massive accumulation of super-weaponry that was too fearsome to be used and yet, paradoxically, still necessary for the illusion of self-defense. Both superpowers also engaged, usually through their allies, several threat-exchanges in Berlin, Quemoy-Matsu and Cuba, in addition to a succession of less-than-total wars, first in Greece and Korea and then in Vietnam. Though none of these conflicts was ever allowed to escalate into massive bilateral wars, they were, nonetheless, terribly costly in men and materiel. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was perhaps the closest that Russia and the U.S. ever came to direct conflict, but its peaceful resolution brought the two superpowers stabilized relations that were based upon the mutual recognition that not only had each a greater vested interest in restraint, but they also had a common interest in keeping all lesser powers weak. Ultimately, however, these minor squabbles had minimal direct effect upon American cultural endeavors, at most accelerating the development of certain technologies; but among the indirect benefits should be counted those criteria for military exemption that produced an appreciable increase in the population for graduate students. (Indeed, remarkably few major minds actually fought in battle, though those few that did, such as the novelists Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller, often found their subsequent writing obsessed with debilitating metaphors of dichotomous conflict.) The pervasive reality was that, in spite of continual sub-maximal conflicts, there was no thermonuclear war, and most Americans went about their daily business under the assumption the world and their world would remain at peace.

Post-1945 Americans witnessed unrivaled prosperity (complementing the extraordinary, and largely unexpected, economic recovery of Europe); for although recessions continued to occur and unemployment was never completely eradicated, while taxes inevitably increased and “pockets of poor” remained unaffected by general developments, the great truth was that the modern cycle of severe extended depressions had been broken. Average income had also multiplied appreciably between 1945 and 1968, achieving levels the world had never seen before (as even the federal legal minimum wage had quadrupled). The great crisis of capitalism, anticipated by the Soviets, simply never occurred. Along with affluence came a sheer increase in the power and energy (measured by any approximate criteria) available to an American individual. Those especially benefiting from the new prosperity included unionized workers, whose regular demands for wage increases were customarily met by business (itself earning far more than before); people in the American South, which was economically emancipated for the first time since the Civil War; and the salaried middle-class, whose average incomes also doubled every decade. Moreover, as bureaucracies became larger, more autonomous and more abundant, it was “organization men” who found their talents most eagerly employed. It is true that inflation, measured by a steady statistical rise in the “cost of living,” meant that a single dollar bought less than before; but twice as many dollars a decade later still purchased more goods and goodies. Indeed, middle-class Americans in 1968 simply expected far more than they had in 1945: at minimum, a television set, a dishwasher, a car, longer vacations for themselves, college educations for their children; so that with increased income also came increased materialistic expectations that often produced unforeseen jealousies and frustrations. As more people could afford the post-1945 ideal of suburban living, it came to pass that the cities were primarily inhabited by the poor, intermingled with the well-to-do and the more adventurous young.

Partly because more efficient technologies of production decreased the demand for physical labor, as well as creating unprecedented material abundance, the United States became the first economy in modern history to classify more than one-half of its labor force in service, or non-primary, occupations, which also became, by and large, far more remunerative than before. Affluence also permitted, if not inspired, a greater and more widespread concern with the “quality” of life, and a related increase in anti-materialistic occupations. By the late 1960s, there were in America, no matter who or how one counted, more painters, more serious poets, more “avant-garde” composers, etc., than in any culture in history—more, not only by gross number but also by percentages! And the audience for all kinds of cultural effort similarly increased. In addition, the proliferation of both checking accounts and credit cards, as well as easily obtained installment-buying, meant that “money” had less immediacy than before; and a younger generation of Americans, raised in prosperity, seemed to find remuneration less of a workaday incentive than their parents did.

That increase in university-level education mentioned before is primarily responsible for a scarcely noticed trend that is nonetheless extremely significant—the greater enlightenment of a greater proportion of the population. That is not to say that by the 1960s most Americans believed in the liberal ideals of, say, equal opportunity, economic redistribution, the illegality of racial and religious prejudice, tolerance of social idiosyncrasies, the ending of colonial and political subjugation, and unrestricted freedom of expression—scarcely so, as there were still large pockets of reactionary ignorance and innocence; but certain attitudes that were espoused by a small, dissenting, well-educated minority in 1945 had by 1965 gained far more popular support. For instance, anti-Semitism, so virulent in the thirties, had all but disappeared by the sixties; artists and intellectuals were no longer apologetic and deferential in public; and “socialism” and “anarchism” were no longer self-condemning words. Many groups previously squashed down participated in the Revolt of the Underling, which I take to be the encompassing 60s theme informing successful protests by students, women, blacks, homosexuals, etc. for equal, if not preferential, status. By the sixties, too, the sort of ideas that, a decade before, would have been dismissed as “before their time” now found increasing dissemination and support. Liberal-radical ideas were most securely propagated in the universities, to be sure; and as education became more widespread and prolonged, the increase in educated populace inevitably created in turn a larger audience for enlightened thinking, which became especially influential among the middle-class young. Precisely because of more widespread enlightenment, another theme for this time was the revolt of the underlings, which is to say that people assigned to a secondary role asserted their claims for equality, whether as women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities, or sometime sexual “deviants.”

This change was most conspicuously reflected, on one hand, in nearly national acknowledgment of the illegitimacy of racial prejudice, as evidenced in judicial decisions, new laws, and new corporate policies; and, hypocrisies and new tensions notwithstanding, much segregation and discrimination has been eliminated from America. There was, by the sixties, a greater concern about hunger and poverty, to mention two social conditions that, decades before, would have been regarded as socially inevitable and, thus, excusable. Change was reflected, on another hand, in the new patterns of book publishing, whose best-seller charts usually contained by 1965 a few volumes more radical than the American norm and then in radio and television programming. The same radical characters and persuasions scorned or ignored by the mass media in 1945 or 1955 were, twenty and ten years later, treated more tolerantly, if not more respectfully, with scarcely a consequential protest from the audience. The sixties also witnessed the growing commercialization of minority attitudes and radical culture (so that there was, for some, a bourgeois’ income in baiting the bourgeoisie). Finally, contemporary thinking in all disciplines has in recent years so rapidly become the content of academic curricula that the kind of up-to-date, still-controversial ideas that were intentionally not-taught in 1945 were by the late 1960s frequently incorporated into the “tradition” presented to students. It is indicative that the kind of anti-American anthology that Harold Stearns organized among his fellow writers and intellectuals in 1921, Civilization in the United States, did not have a sequel in post-War America; and even if it were done, a book so critical of America would not have equally prominent contributors or, needless to say perhaps, much influence.

Paralleling this political and intellectual enlightenment were general changes in social fashions; so that not only was there a colored face visible in high positions in nearly every large American institution, but skirts were at times shorter than before, bodies often more exposed, and bathing suits far briefer. Moreover, the single young woman who said no, no, no in 1945 found that her daughter in 1965 said yes, yes, yes at a far younger age and with increasing frequency. This last change was as much indebted to ideas about “sexual freedom” as the development of new birth-control technologies, such as the pill, the loop, and the coil, that shifted initiative for effective contraception from the man to the woman, putting her in control of preventing pregnancy. Even homosexuality, always a secret before WWII, went public, as cultural celebrities such as Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman declared their preference for loving men. The greater social liberalism of the educated young was among the primary reasons for “the generation gap” that became increasingly perceptible in the middle-classes during the sixties; it also explains why purposeful independent individuals in 1965 generally felt more optimistic and acted with greater confidence than similar figures had felt and acted twenty years before.

Change in our time is hugely indebted to the dissemination of those crucial technologies that transform social patterns, if not psychological outlooks as well. Increases in urban population, for instance, were indebted not only to mass transportation but also to agricultural technologies that enabled farmers to produce far more foodstuffs with much less labor. Just as the automobile had radically changed dating and commuting habits by the beginning of World War II, so new drugs transformed patterns of disease and population; similarly, the commercial airplane changed modes of long-range travel and even intellectual communication. For instance, since Americans of intellectual prominence, previously separated by great distances, now saw much more of one another, they found less need to set their most important thinking to print. As a result, reputations in some fields, such as academic philosophy, were made largely through aural impressions, usually made at professional conferences. In mass communications, the most significant new technology in post-WWII America was television, which replaced movies as the most popular form of kinetic visual entertainment, just as it superceded parents as the primary influence upon the child’s developing mind and replaced radio as the most influential instrument of instantaneous national communication (even though radios, far less costly, would always remain more numerous). Marshall McLuhan was scarcely alone in suggesting that television also re-circuited sensory procedures in everyone’s psyche. Political campaigns were by 1960 run primarily for television exposure; a candidate’s “image” determined his political future. Television also propagated political and social opinions, usually of fairly enlightened sorts, or presented spokesmen of various liberal-radical persuasions. As a de facto “teaching machine,” the tube also told college students in the North what could be done to protest racial injustice in the South and, say, slum-dwellers around the U.S. how their compatriots in Harlem and Watts were conducting their own local riots. Beyond that, the medium kept people immediately “tuned in” to events around the world; for just as tens of millions of Americans simultaneously underwent the ecumenical experience of watching together John F. Kennedy’s funeral, so did young people born after 1945 grow up with an instinctively more internationalist perspective than their elders. Whereas newspapers reported on what happened yesterday, television’s evening news tells what happened today, presenting events that, no matter where in the world they originated, come to feel nearby.

The importance of technological development explains why a new school of historiography holds that politics—official governmental processes—ultimately does less to initiate social change than to hinder those changes already taking place; and such an interpretation would be particularly true for the post-WWII period. A broad retrospective view of recent history shows that major changes come from new technologies and their disseminations, and then from cultural enlightenment, as well as from people acting collectively—civil rights protests, the acceptance of “rock” as the new pop music, the popularity of marijuana; for political administrations, on both the national and regional levels, could be characterized as less or more conservative. Perhaps the most regressive administration, on the national level, was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s, which saw itself as primarily preserving the international peace and halting (rather than repudiating) the Roosevelt-Truman “New Deal.” Though the Eisenhower administration realized both these intentions with moderate competence, it also lost moral authority by tolerating far longer than even cynically prudent the pernicious and supremely demoralizing activity of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the arch intellectual policeman who drove much intelligence out of Washington, whose name still paints an indelible stain upon the fifties, his party, and its President. Eisenhower spent less time on the job than any other recent President, aiming to change very little. Socially speaking, the least reactionary branch during that decade was the Supreme Court, whose 1954 decisions on racial segregation authorized the subsequent civil-rights revolution; but except for a dramatic confrontation in Little Rock, Arkansas, with a Democratic governor, the Eisenhower administration set an ineradicable precedent by typically tolerating, again longer than necessary, the Southern states’ obstructionist tactics on integration.

Even the most skeptical historians have come to admire Harry S Truman as the last truly strong President, who coped successfully with problems he was little-prepared to face—the retrospective truth being that a less confident President might have fared far worse. In spite of his unexpected strength in decisively conducting foreign policy, Truman was too hamstrung by a reactionary, Republican-dominated Congress to achieve much of the progressive domestic legislation he wanted. To John F. Kennedy goes credit for bringing cultural sophistication to the highest political office, if not establishing northeastern liberal values as the norm for “high-class” society; and during his administration, bona fide first-rate minds had more effect upon political policy. As many critics have noted, Kennedy regarded Congress as so antagonistic to his proposals that the expectation of defeat kept him from pushing legislation hard enough. His admirers contend that had Kennedy lived longer the tone of American politics would have become considerably different; and true as that may be, it is nonetheless probable that, except perhaps on the issue of escalating U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, his political activities would have resembled those of his successor. As it happened, Lyndon Johnson, who regarded himself as an heir to Roosevelt and the New Deal, opened his regime by persuading Congress to pass Kennedy’s legislation. Nonetheless, nothing reveals the impotence of political leaders and processes more than their inability to cope with the new problems of the sixties—the growing multiple revolts of the underlings, increasing civil violence and greater generational gaps, as well as all the resulting social conflicts.

The era was marked by swift and pervasive change, most of it thought to be progressive, some of it representing reactions to progress; but further and even greater transformations seemed entwined in time itself. New knowledge and technology inevitably produced many unexpected problems; yet the most reasonable solutions invariably seemed to lie in further new knowledge and technologies, in an unending, snow-balling process. Perhaps the most profound achievement of American culture in the post-WWII period was the growing control over the initiation and channeling of all kinds of change; so that even when others posit or invent, say, a new technology, it has inevitably been Americans who draw upon accumulated intellectual experience to develop, manufacture and distribute it.

Recent American thought remains different from European—more pragmatic and less abstract—most artifacts of the mind continue to reveal their national origins; but cultural differences were generally less pronounced in the physical sciences. “The consciousness of [man’s] active participation in his own development occurred recently—in a first groping manner around the time of the Renaissance,” wrote the futurist John McHale, “but the consciousness of his possible control over his own future development one would place even more recently, possibly in the decade between 1940 and 1950.” Indeed, among the byproducts of intellectual development are not only a greater consciousness of the future, but also a growing competence at initiating a desired change; so that, thanks in part to the increasing power of mind itself, anything remotely possible is becoming increasingly feasible. Beyond that sense of change lies a truly radical goal that would have struck our predecessors as fantastic, but now seems closer to common realization: mind preceding matter, or persistently overcoming material obstacles, rather than succumbing, in all endeavors and dimensions of existence. That last achievement is not only an implicit goal of all intellectual activity; it makes intellectual history the cornerstone of all historiography.

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