The 'Good War': The Second World War and Postwar American Society

Abstract

During the various fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the second world war, culminating in D-Day, VE and VJ Day commemorations, many Americans, with participants from other nations, remembered countrymen who died in the years following Pearl Harbor. Others also looked back nostalgically to the second world war which, according to some observers, was 'the Good War', America's 'finest hour', and 'the most popular war in American history'. The historical profession, having for long ignored the war altogether, is writing increasingly of it as a glorious and, in modern parlance, defining moment in modern American history, shaping a 'postwar era' which lasted up until the 1970s.' In this article I want to attempt some assessment of the war's impact on American society and try to locate it in relation to the pre-war and postwar periods. An increasing volume of scholarship has contributed to a subtle but persistent shift in emphasis in the writing of modern American history. Where once contemporary United States history was seen to begin in the New Deal era with the creation of the modern presidency, the formation of new political alliances, the rise of organized labour, and development of a welfare system, increasingly it is the second world war which is used to mark the emergence of modern America. While the limitations of the New Deal's achievements have been endlessly debated by revisionist historians, the war years are seen in a comparatively more positive light. According to Geoffrey Perrett, the war