The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (1995)

The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996)

Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1997)

Popular Culture in American History (2001; Editor)

Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American Dream (2001)

The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (2003)

The Fieldston Guide to American History for Cynical Beginners:

Impractical Lessons for Everyday Life (2005)

The Civil War Era: An Anthology of Sources (2005; Editor, with Lyde Cullen Sizer)

Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumph (2007)

Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think About History (2009)

Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (2013)

A Short History of the Modern Media (2014)

“We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know.”

—Henry “Rabbit” Angstrom, protagonist of John Updike’s Rabbit Redux, 1971

The textbook is a specific genre of historical writing—it’s a different enterprise than producing a work of original scholarship, for example, and it’s one intended more for the needs of the diploma-minded student than the pleasure-minded general reader (however much one might strive to entertain). Writing a textbook feels a little like making an album of cover versions of your favorite songs: there’s stuff you know you have to do, stuff people are hoping to get, and it’s your job to be both familiar and (a little bit) novel at the same time in reinterpreting songs that are already out there. The accent in this book, as my musical analogy suggests, is a cultural one. But whatever the subfield in question—political history, social history, women’s history—my first word of thanks must be to the generations of scholars on whose shoulders I stand, and here I want to name my mentors at Brown University who decisively shaped my vision of US history: Bill McLoughlin, Jim Patterson, Jack Thomas, and (especially) Mari Jo Buhle, who accepted me into Brown’s American Civilization doctoral program. Other figures are acknowledged in my short bibliographies and footnotes at the end of this book. Still others are part of the rich loam that has and will germinate future works of history. I hope my work may yet settle into a layer of such sediment.

I’d also like to thank my longtime editor, Peter Coveney, who reacted to my pitch for a book about the 1970s and 1980s by suggesting something considerably more ambitious. This is the fifth book (not counting subsequent editions) that I’ve produced in the Wiley publishing stable; this particular one was aided by a series of kind of competent staffers, among them editorial assistant Ashley McPhee, project editor Julia Kirk, copy editor Aravind Kannankara, and production editor Vimali Joseph. Thanks also to marketing manager Leah Alaani.

This book was finished during a stay as a “Thinker in Residence” at Deakin University, with campuses in various locations in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the summer (well, actually, in the Australian winter) of 2015. My deep thanks to Cassandra Atherton, who organized the trip, her husband Glenn Moore of Latrobe University, and the staff, faculty, and students of Deakin who made my trip so memorable. The Ethical Culture Fieldston School has been my professional home for the last 15 years, and I’m grateful for the good company of my students and colleagues and the administration there. Of particular note has been the exceptionally valuable role of music teacher William Norman, who performed a series of roles here that ranged from fact-checking to providing excellent interpretative advice. The dedication of this volume to him is a necessarily insufficient gesture of gratitude.

A word in memoriam: I lost my beloved friend of 33 years, Gordon Sterling, while writing this book. He embodied what was best in our national life: optimism, decency and curiosity of an instinctively egalitarian kind.

Lyde, Jay, Grayson, Ryland, and Nancy: you’re with me always—even at Starbucks, where most of this book was written at its Dobbs Ferry and Ardsley, New York locations. I thank God for you, and for Grande Coffees, among other blessings.

YOU ARE A CHILD OF EMPIRE. You probably don’t think of yourself that way, and there are some good reasons for that. So it’s worth considering those reasons before explaining why it’s helpful in terms of your past—and your future—to understand yourself as such.

One reason you don’t think of yourself as a child of empire is that relatively few people go around talking in this way about the place where you live. You are an American; more specifically, you are a resident of the United States (“America” being a term to describe terrain that rightfully stretches from Canada to Chile, even if common usage suggests otherwise), and you probably think of yourself as living in a democracy. In fact, that’s not true. A democracy is a society in which all citizens—a term that connotes a set of legal rights including those of property, voting, and other privileges—have a say in making government decisions. The proverbial case is that of ancient Athens. Of course, the actual number of citizens in Athens (as opposed to slaves, women, or mere residents, none of whom could claim citizen status) was relatively small. Given the restricted number of people involved, Athenian democracy was a practical possibility: citizens could literally make their voices heard.

The United States, by contrast, is a republic, a geographically large political entity in which representatives get chosen by citizens—more precisely, a subset of citizens eligible to vote that does not include children, for example—who then make laws that apply collectively. The number of people in the US population who enjoyed such a status at the time of the American Revolution was much larger than in ancient Athens, even if it was still relatively small. (The whole question of who actually had representation was of course one of the major reasons for that revolution.) In the centuries that followed, the proportion of citizens grew steadily, and by the middle of the twentieth century it might have almost seemed that inhabitant was virtually the same thing as citizen (voter was always another story). Not only was that untrue, but a great many people who actually were citizens found themselves systematically deprived of their rights, as even a cursory look at women’s history, immigration history, or that of US race relations makes clear.

And yet, for all this, the United States continues to be commonly described, by natives and observers alike, as a democracy. While this is not factually true, it does make sense in cultural terms, if not in political or social ones. Whether as a matter of folkways, foodways, or the popular media, the United States has always been notable for the degree to which a panoply of voices and visions have shaped its society and customs, and the fluidity of its cultural margins and center. It is one of the great ironies of American history, for example, that the period covered in this book, a period that marked the apex of US power and affluence, was decisively influenced by the legacy of its most oppressed people: American slaves. That’s why there’s some logic in designating the nation as democratic in spirit if not always, or even often, in reality.

In any case, the terms “democracy” or “republic” are hardly synonymous with “empire.” In popular imagination, empire is sometimes thought of in terms of a dictator presiding unilaterally over a vast domain, such as Chinggis Khan or Napoleon Bonaparte figuratively straddling continents. There’s some truth to that, though even the most powerful dictators are usually subject to more powerful cultural, if not legal, constraints than is sometimes supposed. But in fact any number of governments can form the basis of an empire. Ancient Athens was both a democracy and an empire. Julius Caesar and his successors presided over a multiethnic and multilingual imperial domain that covered three continents, but the Roman Empire began as a kingdom and thrived as a militarily aggressive republic long before he came along.

Perhaps by this point you’re wondering just what I mean by the word “empire.” I’ll take my definition from the online version of that quintessentially American source, the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1 a (1) : a major political unit having a territory of great extent or a number of territories or peoples under a single sovereign authority; especially : one having an emperor as chief of state (2) : the territory of such a political unit

b : something resembling a political empire; especially : an extensive territory or enterprise under single domination or control

By any historical global standard, the continental United States, stretching thousands of miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, is a “major political unit having a territory of great extent.” That “unit” is also under a “single sovereign authority,” which happens to be the US Constitution. The expansion of that sovereign authority over the continent is something that happened over the course of centuries, as Native American peoples were expelled, displaced, or absorbed by the descendants of Europeans, particularly those from the British Isles. Even before that process was complete, the United States had acquired overseas territories and military bases, which now circle the globe. Americans do not have an emperor, but they do have a president who wields considerable power—and, in the realm of foreign affairs, that power now verges on unilateral. And while not all this territory is governed by the Constitution, the US government nevertheless exercises considerable economic and/or military power far beyond its territorial boundaries. Empires have always exercised power over so-called client states, which are often more convenient to rule indirectly than by formal conquest or control.

By way of illustration, consider the different-but-related status of Hawaii (a set of islands that collectively comprise a state in the Union); the US military installation at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba (which the United States has held for over a century, even though Cuba was never part of the United States and, indeed, despite the two nations being sworn enemies for much of the twentieth century); and Japan (a conquered but now independent and powerful ally bound to the United States by strong military and economic ties). All these, and others, have been important constituent parts of what can legitimately be called the American Empire.

Another reason why this phrase might not roll off your tongue: you haven’t been brought up to think of “empire” as a nice word. You think of empires as unhappy places where people are forced to live in ways not of their own choosing. You understand there are people who make precisely this claim about US behavior abroad, even at home, and have done so for some time. But insofar as you think such people have a point, you’re likely to think of the situations they describe as a temporary, an exceptional—or, perhaps most often—a regrettable situation, not really reflecting US principles. The people most likely to invoke the American Empire wish to make the point that the American government is scarcely any different from European empires of the nineteenth century (or any others, for that matter). This is to say that the United States is hypocritical, violating the terms of its own creation, in which ideals such as “all men are created equal” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are considered sacred—more sacred, at this point, than the Christian faith that underwrote them. Americans think of themselves as exceptional, these critics say. In fact, they’re just like every other empire that falsely trumpets its own virtue.

These critics are correct. The United States is not exceptional in terms of the nature of its government, its rapid territorial acquisition, its global influence, or its tendency to think of itself as uniquely virtuous. That said, while empires are—by definition—aggressive and self-serving in the ways they amass power, they have their uses, even for many of those who are involuntarily subject to them. Empires impose order, and while order can be tyrannical, it can also be convenient, and necessary too, for many forms of a desirable life, whether defined in terms of domestic tranquility, the movement of goods across borders, the protection of minority rights, or the creation of durable works of art.

The other point to be made here—and one that’s most relevant to the matter at hand—is that while empires may not be unique in their behavior, they tend to have distinctive accents. Their power always depends on a substantial degree of brute force, and force that is always applied internally as well as externally. But the success of empires, whether defined in terms of size, longevity, or influence, always rests on other factors—sometimes it’s a culture, the way it was for the Greeks (adapted and extended by the Romans); other times it’s religion, as in the Islamic empires of the seventh through seventeenth centuries; yet other times it’s a personality, such as Alexander the Great, though these tend not to last long. Very often, of course, successful empires exhibit all these features, among others.

But one thing all empires must do is come up with a way to distribute power. There is always concentration at the top. As a practical matter, however, power must be divided somewhat, whether geographically (such as among states), among heirs in a political dynasty, literally or figuratively (we’ve had both in the United States, from the Adams family through the Bush family), or into a set of government functions (such as the three branches of government in the US Constitution). Distributing power is also a way of rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

Depending on their circumstances or values, there can be wide variations in the way empires distribute power. A lot of this will depend on the nature of the power they have, and a lot of that, in turn, will depend on how much control they have over their neighbors. The typical engine of empires is conquest: an army as an investment of time, money, and life, marshaled in the promise of gain that amounts to taking stuff away from other people. The leaders of successful empires keep their promises to reward their soldiers, and a share of the proceeds gets directed toward those who deliver the goods.

That said, the long-term stability of an empire will very often rest on its ability to distribute resources widely—not universally, mind you, but relatively so. Things such as terror or religious fervor can also work, though it’s hard to keep a population in a state of psychological intensity for long periods of time. In general, providing a segment of people (sometimes sorted by race, class, or other markers) with a basic sense of safety and a workable livelihood will reduce the incentive of such people to join resistance movements that will always develop. Over time, the number of people enjoying imperial privileges is likely to grow. So it is, for example, that Roman citizenship was gradually extended to all Italians, foreigners from remote provinces willing to serve in the army, and eventually all free inhabitants of the empire. The Roman Dream, as it were.

Which brings us to the case of the United States. As I’ve said, the United States is not unique in any of the terms I’ve been discussing. But there is one quantitative factor so significant that it has become a qualitative one, and that is the relatively wide distribution of the fruits of empire. Simply put, there has never been anywhere on earth at any time when so many people have had so much.

Before going any further, I need to qualify this assertion about American abundance. First of all, saying so many people have so much doesn’t mean everybody has enough. Discrimination and bad luck have always been facts of life. And even those who have “enough” defined in a narrow sense (sufficient calories to live on, however empty; shelter to speak of, however dangerous; sources of comfort or pleasure, however limited or self-destructive) does not mean that many, or even most, Americans live what most would call a decent life.

If you’re reading this book, the chances are that you do have a decent life. But the chances are also that you hardly think of yourself a child of empire. It seems too grand a term to describe the rather ordinary circumstances of your existence, even if they happen to be comfortable. There’s something a little comical about such a description, similar to the once-proverbial parental demand that a child eat his or her peas because there are starving children in Africa. Insofar as it’s true, it’s also irrelevant (those peas on your plate will never make it to Africa).

But I’m here to tell you that, in some important sense, considering yourself a child of empire is accurate, and it is relevant. From the very beginning of the colonial era, the settlers of what became the United States were, in the words of the title of a classic work of history, a people of plenty. “Take foure of the best kingdomes in Christendom and put them all together, they may in no way compare with this countrie either for commodities or goodnesse of soile,” the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia, Thomas Dale, said, not entirely exaggerating, in 1611.¹ Even unquestionably oppressed slaves enjoyed a standard of living higher than their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas, as historians of slavery routinely acknowledge.² The reality of relative plenty continued into the twentieth century. In 1948, the government of the Soviet Union screened the 1940 Hollywood film The Grapes of Wrath to illustrate to Russian public the failures of US capitalism. But government censors had to pull the movie from circulation when it became clear that Russian audiences were amazed that these impoverished Americans nevertheless owned cars.³ Televisions, cellphones, Internet connections: even unacceptably poor Americans enjoy the fruits of US technology and consumer culture in ways that would have dazzled kings of earlier generations.

One implication you should not draw from the presence of widespread prosperity across American history is any special virtue in the ruling elites that have run this country in the last 400 years. The conditions I’m describing were as much the result of a series of pre-existing conditions—moderate climate, good soil, a bounty of natural resources, relatively weak challengers for the relatively capacious and lightly populated land—than any human design. When Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed that all men are created equal, and that they were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, he did not present these notions as aspirations. Instead, he presented them as facts, as “self-evident” truths conferred by what he called “Nature’s God.” To the degree that there was any human design on the part of the nation’s founders—and there certainly was some—the relatively wide distribution of resources was a form of enlightened self-interest in charting a path of least resistance in gaining the allegiance of a populace that was not always unified. To cite perhaps the most important example: the emancipation of four million slaves in 1865 represented more an economic imperative and the triumph of one imperial elite over another than the inevitable triumph of a just cause, the inspiring prose of Abraham Lincoln notwithstanding.

Emancipation occurred just as the Industrial Revolution, which laid the foundations for modern American consumer capitalism, made the pursuit of happiness here seem more plausible to millions of people around the world. This form of capitalism also made it plausible to believe that material prosperity would engender conditions conducive to psychic prosperity as well. Note, however, that “plausible” does not mean “certain,” or even “likely.” Nor does it deny the possibility that someone could say, with at least as much credibility, that the reality of life, liberty, and happiness are far from self-evident—and that happiness is not actually the most worthy goal in life. Actually, many people in the United States have said such things in any number of ways in the last few centuries. Doing so is part of the polyglot literary tradition, which stretches from Anne Bradstreet to Herman Melville to Malcolm X and beyond. And these figures had some very good reasons for saying so as a matter of personal experience or observation.

But the key point—actually it’s the premise on which this book rests—is that enough people have believed in the grand promises of the Declaration of Independence to make the United States more or less governable since 1776. In a sense, this is what’s self-evident, for if large numbers of people did not subscribe to that myth (a term I use to describe a proposition that is widely believed but not empirically confirmable), the Union would not have survived. Amid some widely expressed doubts, and amid well-founded suspicions that the nation’s abundance was being squandered, unfairly distributed, or simply evaporating, a critical consensus on the viability of the myth managed to hold sway. Elections could proceed and decisions could be made precisely because the legitimacy of national hopes were taken for granted. It was always a matter of how, not if, they could be realized.⁴

In modern times, we’ve given a name to these promises, placing them in a conceptual umbrella that we call the “American Dream.” Though the term only came into widespread use in the 1930s, Americans of earlier centuries would have understood that it functioned as shorthand for what a great many of them had always believed was there for the taking—the reality of abundance; the real possibility of gaining, augmenting, or redistributing it; and the sense of satisfaction that would follow from its flow.

It’s significant that the term “American Dream” first entered common parlance during the Great Depression, because it was during these years that the promises of national life went under their widest and deepest reappraisal, as the nation’s collective confidence was shaken to its core. But as many studies of the decade have attested, the nation came out of the 1930s with widespread reaffirmations of the American Dream. There are two basic reasons for this. The first is that the US government and economy were able to stabilize internally, to at least some degree as a result of the statecraft of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who sanded down the most destructive edges of industrial capitalism and successfully reassured electoral majorities of Americans that their fears about the death of the American Dream would prove unfounded. The other is that the most obvious alternatives to it—represented on the Left by Stalin’s Soviet Union and the Right by Hitler’s Germany—were decidedly less appealing. Actually, these two reasons converged in the military buildup that the United States began in the late 1930s, which bolstered the nation’s capacity to contend with its imperial rivals and, in the process, stimulated the economy even more effectively than Roosevelt’s New Deal did. A reinvigorated American Dream trumped the collectivist fantasies of Communists and Nazis.

It was a third rival, imperial Japan, who finally provoked a cautious, even skeptical, United States into World War II. A generation earlier, the nation had intervened in World War I and emerged from it as the only other major power stronger than it had been at the start of the war. Despite such success, the United States, unlike Japan, reverted to a longstanding tendency to avoid direct involvement in overseas affairs. But when the nation finally did commit to war in 1941, the results were, from an imperial standpoint, spectacularly successful. The United States risked the least and gained the most from World War II, fighting on two fronts simultaneously and steamrolling arguably superior military talent under the sheer weight of its immense industrial capacity (and extending lifelines to its British, Soviet, and Chinese allies in the process). When the war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs in 1945, the United States was unquestionably the world’s greatest military and economic power, even if it also had gathering rivals preparing to challenge it.

World War II was also a watershed event in the domestic history of the United States. Despite fears of a return to the economic conditions of the Great Depression, it soon became clear that the promises of the American Dream were more shimmering and alluring than ever. Again, the realities of national life were, in a great many cases, different. And across the nation there were forces mobilizing to thwart the great expectations that were rising in the land. But the potency of hope was simply too great to be denied. That potency was powerful in what it could achieve; it was dangerous in what it could upend; it was risky in the disappointment it could engender. But neither friend nor foe could anticipate, much less control, the force of the American Dream as it surged to high tide.

This is the point where our story begins. In the three-quarters of a century since World War II, US power was like an alternating current that surged through the body politic. That power affected people in different ways, and generated different outcomes. It was sometimes channeled in specific directions; in others, it was impeded (consider the role of the semiconductor as fact and metaphor); and in still others it was suppressed or denied in ways that generated friction (a source of electricity in its own right). In a very important sense, the perception of power was often more significant than the reality. What people believed was possible, what they feared and what they hoped, are the keys to understanding American culture since World War II.

This book will look at those perceptions, fears, and hopes in the context of the facts of American life as they are known. These facts include financial resources (measured in terms such gold reserves and annual GDP), technological innovations (here I’ll note that virtually all modern electronics, from computers through cell phones, run on alternating current), and sociological changes (e.g., the rise and fall of birth and divorce rates). However, that elusive but pervasive thing we call culture—discussed here primarily in terms of the mass media, the fine arts, and the intellectual currents that coursed through academe and journalistic circles—will be central to what the book purports to chronicle, which is to provide a framework through which recent US history can be understood.

This story is, perhaps inevitably, one of declension: the American empire was so powerful in 1945 largely because its rivals were by comparison so weak. That was bound to change, in part because shrewd US politicians understood that rebuilding former enemies was good policy. But it is also hard not to sense a more immutable, if dimly understood, rhythm of history at work. Empires rise and fall. That’s certain. And yet, their peculiar trajectory can only begin to be understood in retrospect. In any case, individual lives always unfold somewhat independently of national fates. Those lives unfold in a particular context that demarcates any number of possibilities and limits. That’s why trying to understand that context makes some sense, and why in particular it makes some sense to do so relatively early in one’s life. We study the past in the hope that history is not necessarily destiny: we hope for the capacity to plot our own futures. This hope may be an illusion, but it’s a sustaining one, and one that can have positive consequences even if our aspirations go unrealized. In any case, a desire to dream your own destiny—and, more crucially, the notion that you can plausibly do so on these shores—is nothing if not characteristically American.