PART 8 The Modern State and the Age of Liberalism, 1945–1980
CHAPTER 25
Cold War America, 1945–1963
CHAPTER 26
Triumph of the Middle Class, 1945–1963
CHAPTER 27
Walking into Freedom Land: The Civil Rights Movement, 1941–1973
CHAPTER 28
Uncivil Wars: Liberal Crisis and Conservative Rebirth, 1961–1972
CHAPTER 29
The Search for Order in an Era of Limits, 1973–1980
Between 1945 and 1980, the United States became the world’s leading economic and military power. That development defines these decades as a distinct period of American history. Internationally, a prolonged period of tension and conflict known as the Cold War drew the United States into an engagement in world affairs unprecedented in the nation’s history. Domestically, three decades of sustained economic growth, whose benefits were widely, though imperfectly, distributed, expanded the middle class and brought into being a mass consumer society. These international and domestic developments were intertwined with the predominance of liberalism in American politics and public policy. One might think of an “age of liberalism” in this era, encompassing the social-welfare liberalism that was a legacy of the New Deal and the rights liberalism of the 1960s, both of which fell under the larger umbrella of Cold War liberalism.
Global leadership abroad and economic prosperity at home were conditioned on further expansions in government power. How that power was used proved controversial. Immediately following World War II, a national security state emerged to investigate so-called subversives in the United States and, through the clandestine Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to destabilize foreign governments abroad. Meanwhile, American troops went to war in Korea and Vietnam. At home, African Americans, women, the poor, and other social groups called for greater equality in American life and sought new laws and government initiatives to make that equality a reality. Here, in brief, are the three key dimensions of this convulsive, turbulent era.