American Experiment (333 page)

It was one of the saddest moments in postwar history, for each of the leaders, in his better half, genuinely wished for détente. Eisenhower came off the worse. He went on to Paris, but the “summit was over before it started, all the hopes for détente and disarmament gone with it,” in Ambrose’s bleak words. He had only a few months left to see his Vice President, Nixon, defeated, a brash young Democrat elected, and no further progress toward détente. At least he could advise the nation. In his Farewell Address he pointed to the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” and warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The price of such acquisition could be the loss of freedom.

His great solace was that he had “kept the peace.” People, he said later,
asked how it had happened. “By God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that!” But he told a friend not long before his death in March 1969 that he had longed to bring world peace but “I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.” Could anyone else have done better? Ike had the wry satisfaction of living through two Democratic presidencies for which the U-2 affair was a dress rehearsal—a minor flap compared to the real crises and stalemates of Cuba and Vietnam.

T
OWARD THE END
of the 1950s the Soviet Union had about 3.6 million persons under arms, the United States about 2.5 million. Each nation maintained stupendous nuclear arsenals capable of devastating the other. With its more than 500 long-range B-52S, almost 1,800 medium-range bombers, twenty-three aircraft carriers, and three Polaris submarines, the United States was far ahead in the capability for continental attack or massive retaliation, while Soviet troops, tanks, land-based aircraft, and medium-range ballistic missiles confronted the European allies. British and other friendly forces bolstered the power of the West. Amid a remarkable variety of nuclear weapons—from recoilless riflelike Davy Crocketts for close-up infantry support to eight-inch howitzers to ballistic missiles— the Strategic Air Command wielded the most usable military might, for its “bombers could burst through the pervious screen that protected our opponent.”

The nation’s relative economic power was even more marked than its military. National economic productivity had grown strongly during the 1950s, as had the gross national product. Americans produced almost half the world’s generation of electricity and large shares of its steel, copper, and coal. The nation’s exports and imports dwarfed those of all other countries. In 1955 a congressional report had shown the United States leading the Soviet Union in virtually every dimension of economic power. “For the United States,” economic historian David F. Noble summed it up, “the postwar decades were an expansive time, fertile ground for technological achievement and enchantment.” Assured by their leaders—in this era before Sputnik—of their unrivaled military, economic, and industrial might, “infused with the pride, confidence, and triumphant optimism of victory, relatively unscarred by the actual horrors of war, and with the ruins of failed empires at their feet, Americans embarked upon their own ambiguous fling at empire.”

An empire? Americans hardly thought in such grandiose terms. Yet their influence reached to the Caribbean, to Alaska and Hawaii, both of which became states in 1959, to old and to newly reconquered bases in the
Pacific, to their military protectorate Taiwan. Military, economic, diplomatic ties intertwined American power with Latin American nations through the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance of 1947, with European and Middle Eastern nations through the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, with Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and other nations through the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty of 1954, with Japan and South Korea through mutual defense treaties. Dulles spent much of his time rushing from capital to capital repairing and refurbishing these ties. On the vast chessboard of Atlantic and Pacific power few doubted which nation held queen, castles, and knights.

European allies viewed American military and technological prowess with awe and fear. The Yanks’ advanced aircraft, their H-bombs and capacity to deliver them, their magnificent flattops, along with their fancy big automobiles, refrigerators, computers, and other gadgetry, were the talk of European capitals. But foreigners feared that Americans with their awesome military power were like children playing with dangerous toys. European pundits wrote scorchingly of American pretensions of leading the “free world,” of American soldiers and other visitors who scattered their dollars, Cokes, slang words, and bastard children across the Continent. French intellectuals attacked the new barbarism, while nourishing the consoling thought that Europe could serve, in Max Lerner’s words, “the role of a cultural Greece to the American Rome—a Greece which, while conquered, takes the conqueror captive.” Still, in the aftermath of the Marshall Plan most people in countries benefiting by the Plan admired America’s “free elections” and other democratic institutions, saw the “real issue” as “communism and dictatorship versus democracy and freedom,” and had faith in the Plan itself as aiding European economic recovery.

The Kremlin responded to Western militancy with its own provocations and interventions, threats and bluster, combined with occasional essays at détente. Behind its actions lay deep fears—of an increasingly independent and hostile China, a turbulent and unpredictable Middle East, unrest in its satellites that might lead to outbreaks of Titoism, a resurgent Germany. Above all Moscow feared renewal of the old threat of Western—now “capitalist”—encirclement. The view from Moscow was of American power stretching from the Aleutians through Korea and Japan to the Philippines, from Southeast Asia to Turkey and Greece up through Europe to Scandinavia. Acutely aware of his strategic nuclear inferiority, Khrushchev resorted even to bluff to conceal it—most notably when he flew the same squadron of his Bison bombers in circles around a reviewing stand at a 1955 Aviation Day ceremony.

Yet even uneasier and more mistrustful than the Russians in the late
1950s were most Americans. If a leader as levelheaded as Eisenhower could have been “obsessed” by fear of a communist Iran on the borders of the Soviet Union, it was hardly strange that many Americans, saturated from school days by talk of Soviet power and Bolshevik evil, should match fear with fear, anger with anger. Thus Khrushchev’s paper-fort deception with his Bisons triggered in Washington a sharp “bomber gap” scare that in turn produced a quick boost in B-52 bomber-building. Visiting the United States, Europeans who viewed themselves as occupying the nuclear front lines were amused to find Americans huddling—intellectually if not physically—in bomb shelters. Americans during the 1950s found themselves feared in their image around the globe but fearful themselves of the future.

Not that most Americans worried about their survival as a nation. Having appointed themselves guardians of liberty, however, they feared for the survival of freedom in the Western world. As in the past, they were far more effective in saluting freedom than in defining it. But definition was crucial. FDR’s Four Freedoms—of speech and religion, from fear and want—were only a starting point. What
kind
of freedom—individual, civil, economic, religious, ethnic? Freedom
for
whom—minorities, blacks, women, artists, intellectuals, censors of textbooks, extremists, pornographers, noncitizens? Freedom
when
—after World War II, after the cold war? Freedom
from
whom? The reds abroad? The “commies” at home? The “feds”? Corporation chiefs? Foremen? Deans? Religious zealots? Group and community pressures? It would become clear in the 1950s and 1960s that threats to these freedoms emanated from far more complex and numerous sources than the Politburos of Moscow and Peking.

The most striking aspect of freedom in America in the 1950s was its grounding in the nation’s technological might and economic abundance. During the half century past, Americans had proved their capacity to outproduce their rivals in automobiles, domestic appliances, and a host of other manufactures; during the 1940s they had astonished the world with their feats in building ships and weapons. By the early 1950s Americans could—and did—boast that their per capita income of approximately $1,500 was roughly double that of the British and the Swedes, more than four times that of the Russians. With 7 percent of the world population, the United States had over 40 percent of the world’s income.

Would freedom flower in America during the fifties amid such plenty?
The prospects were highly mixed. Historically freedom had flourished not where life was nasty, brutish, and short but in expanding economies that fostered equality of opportunity, more sharing, vertical and horizontal mobility. Still horrified by revelations about Nazi mass slaughter, shocked by new revelations about the monstrous “crimes of the Stalin era,” many Americans valued their own liberties all the more. Yet the 1950s, at the height of cold war anxieties, turned out to be a decade of intolerance of other Americans’ ideas. Individualism in the economic marketplace was not matched by individual liberty in the political and intellectual marketplace.

Advocates of the free market were happy with their economic freedoms during the Age of Eisenhower, however, and even more with their economic successes. “We have entered a period of accelerating bigness in all aspects of American life,” proclaimed Eric Johnston confidently in 1957. “We have big business, big labor, big farming and big government.” The former head of the United States Chamber of Commerce even mused whether this was the start of an age of “socialized capitalism.” Certainly American business, if not “socializing,” was consolidating, bureaucratizing, innovating, and proliferating at home and overseas. Over 4,000 mergers and acquisitions of manufacturing and mining concerns occurred during the 1950s—a dramatic number though almost 3,000 fewer than in the 1920s. Large firms took over smaller ones less to run risks than to minimize them; despite Joseph Schumpeter’s warning of the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” the survival rate of large firms during the decade was almost 100 percent. Elaborate systems of recruitment, personnel, information, and leadership training expanded in the big corporations, with the help of complex office machines and business school graduates.

The power of the American economy, however, lay far less in bigness and organization than in technological and scientific advances stemming from a century of experimentation and invention and later propelled by the imperative demands of two world wars and the cold war. And just as nineteenth-century army ordnance needs had promoted such important innovations as interchangeable parts, so world war needs fueled such varied practical achievements as penicillin, jet propulsion, and radar. Massive federal spending for invention and development carried on through the cold war years; by the late 1950s Washington was financing nearly 60 percent of the nation’s total research and development budget. In one major respect, however, twentieth-century technology was more than simply a wider and more varied activity than that of the nineteenth. In Nathan Rosenberg’s words, “an increasing proportion of technological changes”
were now “dependent upon prior advances in systematized knowledge.” Innovators were more dependent than in Edison’s day on scientific disciplines such as physics and chemistry.

Some of the postwar advances in specific fields were spectacular. In October 1947, Captain Charles E. Yeager burst through the invisible barrier that had seemed to fix a limit to the speed of flight by flying the experimental rocket-powered X-1 faster than the speed of sound. In September 1948, an air force Sabre set a world speed record for jet fighters at 670 miles an hour; five years after that a Super Sabre became the first jet to cross the sound barrier, hitting 755, and in 1957 a Voodoo jet topped 1,200. The nuclear submarine
Nautilus
was reported to have used 8.3 pounds of uranium fuel to travel 60,000 miles. After the inglorious “Kaputnik” of the first Vanguard, the American space program made steady progress. And by 1960 the X-15 rocket plane was flying almost twice as fast as the Voodoo.

More down-to-earth, but crucial to a wider technology, were advances in the sector in which Yankee tinkerers had pioneered a century earlier with their milling and grinding machines. This was the machine tool industry. Severely depressed after its World War II expansion—300,000 machine tools were dumped onto the market after the war—the industry burgeoned during the cold war. Aircraft manufacture, a voracious consumer of machine tools, also became increasingly interlinked with the electronics industry, which was now producing its own miracles. Though eventually developing its own huge domestic market, for years electronics reflected wartime need for miniaturization of electrical circuits in proximity fuses for bombs, gunfire control mechanisms, radar and sonar. As late as the mid-1960s the federal government was still providing two-thirds of the “R&D” costs of the electrical equipment industry, which included such giants as General Electric and American Telephone and Telegraph.

Earthiest of all—and perhaps most important of all for its worldwide implications—was innovation in farming. Improved harvesters and other machines, combined with better fertilizers and sprays and new plant strains, produced higher output per acre, a vast increase in production, and a steep decrease in the total work hours in the United States devoted to agriculture. By 1960 8 percent of the labor force was occupied with farming, compared with 63 percent a century before. Hybrid corn, a systematic crossing of selected inbred lines, resulted in an increase in the average yield of corn per acre from 23 bushels in 1933 to 62 bushels in the mid-1960s. Thus hybrid corn research paid off handsomely, returning, it was estimated, seven times its cost by the mid-1950s. The lion’s share of the boost in farm yield came from—and profited—huge family farms,
commercial farms, and other components of “agribusiness” that controlled the production and marketing of key foods and fibers through vertical integration, while millions of small farmers and migrant farm workers clung to a precarious livelihood.