Postwar America Research Articles

Benjamin Looker . A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 432 pp.

Benjamin Looker . A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 432 pp.

La cambiante simbología de lo ordinario. Una aproximación visual americana

<p><em>The concept of “the ordinary” has become an ever more usual reference in the analysis of certain architectonic and territorial situations; but also social ones, which seem to escape any order set by planning. Nonetheless, the word still carries a rather ambiguous meaning, because not only the term is in itself polysemic, but also because it can have several interpretations, sometimes in a contradictory way, depending on the area of study, the time or the place in which it is used. This text addresses some of these apparent contradictions through a selection of visual expressions that emerge from the reassessment of “the ordinary” within a particular context: America in the seventies. To illustrate our views, we will use the work of two renowned photographers: David Plowden and Stephen Shore. Architecture was the centre focus of their images, which are part of the broad tradition of depicting American everyday life. We will analyse and compare them with the purpose of identifying their frictions and, more importantly, the values that transformed each of them from the ordinary into a perfect tool to deal with the strange and unstable material situation lived in post-war America.</em></p>

Conceptual Debts: Modern Architecture and Neo-Thomism in Postwar America

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference.

Mysticism and Pragmatism in Modern Religious Architecture

Kahn at Penn: Transformative Teacher of Architecture. By James Williamson. New York: Routledge, 2015. xv + 204 pp. $163.00 (cloth); $52.95 (paper).Temples for a Modern God: Religious Architecture in Postwar America. By Jay M. Price. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 256 pp. $82.00 (cloth).Prayer literally takes place. People pray and listen for God in actual places. The idea of seems to imply that God is more likely to be encountered in certain places than in others, and the Celtic intuition of thin affirms locations where the divine breaks through more easily in earthly experience. Divine mystery, for example, may be more easily sensed in an evocative setting such as Durham Cathedral, although mystery is not limited to the grand and the Romanesque. On the other hand, divine creativity may be better grasped where sacred place and nature are gracefully joined, such as the many fine contemporary chapels with windows of clear glass at Episcopal camp and conference centers. While the biblical God transcends all limitations of place, Episcopalians and other Christians have long known the importance of returning to sacred places in order to experience some aspect of the divine nature.James Williamson s Kahn at Penn: Transformative Teacher of Architecture is a book with a subtle but important connection with Episcopal architecture. Although the author references the Episcopal Church only once,1 I know for a fact that Williamson is an active Episcopalian because I am his parish priest. Williamson is also the architect of two Episcopal churches, including St. George's Episcopal Church (completed in 2007) in Germantown, Tennessee, an inspiring design that resists easy categorization as either traditional or contemporary.The subject of Williamsons book is the life and work of architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974), who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and maintained his own architectural office in Philadelphia. Williamson was one of Kahn's students. Kahn's architectural buildings are numerous, but two religious designs are particularly relevant for Episcopalians. The First Unitarian Church of Rochester was designed by the Episcopalian Richard Upjohn in the nineteenth century, and subsequently was replaced in 1962 by Kahn's building. Kahn's First Unitarian is a fine example of his mystical view of natural light and shadows. The second example of Kahn's sacred architecture, Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, was never built but Kent Larson's Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterpieces includes several computer-generated images of this synagogue.2 Hurva reveals Kahn's mastery of the balance between the communal and the individual, as well as the balance between transcendence and immanence.The subject of Williamson's book, however, is Kahn's teaching and philosophy of education, not his architecture, although these subjects are inseparable. Kahn's philosophy of education and architecture could be described as mystical. For example, Williamson notes Kahn invented a term-unmeasurable-to describe he believed to be the mystical forms of architecture.3 Williamson summarizes:Kahn taught that the architect must use intuition to discover the eternal, pre-existing Form of a building, an understanding of its existence will, of what the building wants to be, without regard to the site, the program, or the architect himself might want to design. The concept recalls the metaphor in Plato's Republic of the prisoners whose understanding of the unseen world outside their cave is shaped by the shadows projected on its walls.4Kahn's teaching style was eclectic, socratic, and deeply influenced by the Talmudic method.5 Williamson writes, Indeed, some of his observations have biblical overtones, such as his enigmatic statement, 'Order Is.' In its economy, ambiguity and sense of much left unsaid, it is reminiscent of Yahweh's revelation to Moses: 'I am that I am.'6 Williamson overlooks the influence of the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, whose parable about architecture is cited in full at the end of Kahns lecture given in 1969 in Zurich, Silence and Light. …

A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America

Benjamin Looker's A Nation of Neighborhoods brilliantly explores the “conflicted yet central role of neighborhood concepts” in the national imagination from the post–World War II era through the early 1980s (p. 198). The book won the Organization of American Historians’ Lawrence W. Levine Award for the best book in American cultural history in 2016; the selection committee deemed it “cultural history at its best … an innovative, imaginative portrayal of the concept of neighborhoods” (St. Louis University College of Arts and Sciences newsletter, April 2016, http://www.slu.edu/Documents/arts_sciences/Newsletter/BenLookerPressRelease.pdf). The book conducts a sweeping analysis of wide-ranging sources, using the neighborhood concept to reveal and address cultural anxieties and aspirations during a forty-year period. The range of texts serving as examples in the chronologically organized chapters is staggering. They include political debates and writings, popular nonfiction, novels, films, museum exhibits, public art, sociological theory, Russell Sage Foundation grants, Sesame Street television programs, and urban planning designs. The book's political breadth and diversity are equally impressive, spanning the early 1940s Popular Front revival of neighborhoods as “microcosms of democracy” (p. 327); Robert Nesbit's and Morris Janowitz's conservative antiauthoritarian commentaries on community in the 1950s; community-improvement drives of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs; Milton Kotler's neighborhood self-government proposal in the 1960s; the 1970s work of conservatives such as Michael Novak and progressives such as Barbara Mikulski and Gale Cincotta, arguing for the power and potential of white ethnic neighborhoods; the mid-1970s second-wave feminist outreach by the National Congress of Neighborhood Women; and liberal Democrats ceding to Ronald Reagan and the rising New Right a romanticized view of neighborhood and its potential as a grassroots power base in the early 1980s.

Critical Thinking as Cold War Weapon: Anxiety, Terror, and the Fate of Democracy In Postwar America

In the years following World War Two, American intellectuals set out to salvage what they could from the heritage of liberal-democratic western thought. In the wake of destruction, atomic peril, and holocaust central assumptions about rationalism, progress, science, and communications had eroded, all to be replaced by general sense of fear and anxiety.2 Scanning the dusk of world war and the dawn of cold war, it was difficult not to see that something terrible had happened to humanity. As one historian elegiacally observed, Never before had progress seemed so fragile, history so harmful or so irrelevant, science so lethal, aggregations of power so ominous, life so full of contingencies, human relationships so tenuous, the self so fragile, man so flawed (Graebner xi).Eager to identify the roots of the devastation, pierce the hovering dread, and take measures to prevent recurrence, authors and academics from across the political spectrum believed they had found culprit in Enlightenment philosophy and remedy in modernist culture. The eighteenthcentury faith in reason and human nature, its demystification of social norms, religion, and tradition, and its leveling of hierarchy seemed to mark tragic turning point in the history of civilization. No longer beholden to eternal ideals, the common man fell victim to ephemeral ideology; belief in the inherent goodness of the noble savage and the onward march of progress had led to a new kind of barbarism (Adorno and Horkheimer xi). Tracing direct line from Rousseau to Hitler and Stalin, these scholars and writers lamented that liberal architects of political philosophy had placed too much weight on cognition and creature comforts rather than souls and sensibilities. Rootedness, recognition of sin, and respect for eternal principles better served the needs of individuals in the modern world.3From CIA offices in Foggy Bottom to the garrets of poets and groves of academe came strikingly similar strategies for protecting freedom and democracy from the kind of turmoil unleashed by World War Two and from the onward march of communism. They entailed creating cultural stability: fostering works of the imagination; cultivating an aesthetic sensibility; and imbuing sympathy for fellow citizens that complemented, rather than corroded, the republican civic virtues of thrift, modesty, self-discipline, and industry. They translated those hopes into plan to reground moral values in political philosophy inflected with the transcendent values of literature, creating an undercurrent in American intellectual and cultural life. In their endeavor to rebuild critical moral foundation for American society, they took part in trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas that welcomed into the fold Warsaw bloc poets. These anti-communist, staunchly individualist writers argued that the road away from totalitarianism-one that led to the liberation of captive minds-lay in wrestling with complex literature and developing interpretive depth.Elite high culture, which valued ambiguity, complexity, irony, and nuance-in place of simple-minded platitudes or politically engaged social novels-promised to tease out meaning in morally tangled postwar world. Public intellectuals, writers, artists, academics, and even national security leaders across the political spectrum became convinced that, in order to save democracy from totalitarian terror and dogma, Americans had to develop critical thinking skills, read widely and deeply and, in the realm of culture, privilege difficulty, and complexity. This conviction welded with other developments in postwar American intellectual life to fuse new attitude toward thinking itself.4Indeed, interest in the mind's functioning was everywhere in art, academia, and literature during the Age of Anxiety (as W. H. Auden's 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume branded the era). Reading between the lines and working to strengthen your mind became best practice, whether literary critic's explication of text, psychologist's Rorschach test, Scientologist's auditing session, or Holden Caufield's ferreting out of phonies. …

Cold War and the US Food System:Culture, Gender, and Consumerism in Postwar America

Cold War and the US Food System:Culture, Gender, and Consumerism in Postwar America

Benjamin Looker. A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America.

Benjamin Looker. A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America.

The purchasing powerless: postwar consumption in The Twilight Zone

ABSTRACTRod Serling’s Twilight Zone (1959–1964) emerged during a period of American history which has since become something of myth, legend, and lore. Seen as a kind of golden age when middle class aspirations were within reach, suburban housing affordable, and the nuclear family perfectly contented, postwar America was more accurately characterized by profound cognitive dissonances. At a time when the Cold War was understood to be first and foremost a battle of ideas, psychological marketing promoted many different facets of the American dream. While market researchers plumbed the depths of American minds and explored their subconscious desires and insecurities to better promote goods, homes, and jobs, American consumers were generally not as well-acquainted with understanding how psychological manipulations were impacting their rapidly changing world. Consequently, a fast-growing knowledge gap began to emerge between marketers on the one hand, and the consuming public on the other. The Twilight Zone, by focusing on the ‘dimension of mind,’ worked to raise viewers’ awareness of how their minds represented fiercely contested ground for marketers and postwar policy-makers alike. In particular, this article focuses on the ways which consumers and retail workers were increasingly dehumanized at the same time consumer goods were becoming more life-like.

Blind Like Me: John Howard Griffin, Disability, Intersectionality, and Civil Rights in Postwar America

More than fifty years after the publication of Black Like Me , scholars have yet to realize the potential for using John Howard Griffin and his famous book to alter some of our fundamental assumptions about identity and civil rights in postwar America. Reading Black Like Me in conjunction with Griffin's writings about blindness shows how disability shaped one of the twentieth century's most popular and influential texts about passing, racism, and civil rights. More broadly, an intersectional framing of Griffin's life and writings helps reveal the complicated and sometimes strained relationship between African American and disability rights in modern America.

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America by Gretchen Buggeln

The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America. By Gretchen Buggeln. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. Pp. xxix, 345. Library cloth, $140.00. ISBN 978-0-8166- 9495-2. Paperback, $40.00. ISBN 978-0-8166-9496-9.)Gretchen Buggeln is an American Studies scholar who teaches in Christ College at Valparaiso University. She has broad interest in the relationship between the Christian faith and material world, with a special interest in religious space. The Suburban Church conveys research into church building projects of three significant Midwestern architects: Edward D. Dart, Edward A. Sovik, and Charles E. Stade. Buggeln is especially interested in discovering the socio-cultural influences that motivated building design choices for suburban faith communities in the postwar period. Seventy-five faith communities are examined in particular, the majority of whom are Protestant. The churches examined for Dart and Stade are located primarily in Illinois; most of the churches examined for Sovik are located in Minnesota. At least eighty interviews were conducted by the author between 2005 and 2013, including several with Sovik. One hundred and thirty-nine black and white photographs are spread through the various chapters.Buggeln's analysis is primarily descriptive and is accomplished in eight chapters. Chapter one provides an overview of several important movements at work in the background during the post-war period. Mention is made of the dramatic building boom of the mid-twentieth century, fueled by the growth and development of suburbs around major urban centers, yielding numerous new church buildings. She notes the influence of proponents of modernist design in denominational agencies and among architects (especially through ecumenical activities), favored (in part) for the rapid construction that could be achieved on a minimal budget. Chapter two provides an introduction to the three architects featured in Buggeln's research. A brief biographical sketch of each architect is provided conveying the faith background, architectural education, and establishment of each architect in relation to church design. Significant buildings and design awards for each architect, such as St. Procopius Abbey, Lisle, Illinois, by Dart, are also noted.Chapter three outlines the process congregations pursued as they imagined, planned, and constructed new church buildings. The role of the building committee is described. Frequently a sense of mission (desire for evangelism in the emerging suburb) fostered an urgency to build. Education of the building committee is examined with visual and written artifacts. Chapter four provides a brief history of A-frame design, a particularly popular building style for Protestants from the 1950s to mid-1960s. …

Further Forward through the Past: Postwar American Jews Reconfigure the East European Tradition in Cultural Terms

From the 1940s well into the 1960s, a new sociocultural constellation let American Jews redefine their relationship to the religious tradition. This article analyzes the response of a religious elite of rabbis and intellectuals to this process, which was driven by various factors. Many American Jews were at least one generation away from traditional Judaism, which seemed out of place in postwar America. Liberal Judaism, with its narrow concept of religion, on the other hand, while fitting a larger social consensus, did not satiate many Jews' spiritual and identity needs. Sensing this deficit, rabbis and other religious thinkers explored broader concepts of Judaism. Religious journals that sprang up in the postwar decades served as vehicles for the attempt to understand Judaism in broader, cultural terms, while preserving a religious core. The article shows how in this search religious thinkers turned to the Eastern European past as a resource. As other groups similarly tried to mine this past for the sake of their present agendas, its reconstruction became a key process in the transformation of postwar American Judaism and its relationship to the tradition.

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast": Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest

A "brutal, unprincipled, drunken, vice-ridden beast":Maternity in Shirley Jackson's The Bird's Nest Lynne Ann Evans (bio) Although shirley jackson wrote six novels and one hundred and ten short stories, and is considered "one of the most prominent female writers of the 1950s" (Murphy 3), scholarship on her work is limited. In part, critical reticence to discuss Jackson's work is attributed to the author's interest in domestic fiction, an interest that helped substantiate Betty Friedan's claim that Jackson's work encouraged paternalistic stereotypes of women (52–3). More recently, Eric Savoy suggests that feminist scholarship's apathy toward Jackson's work is due, in part, to the fact that her texts evince a "troubling" and "recurring preoccupation with poisonous mother-daughter relationships" (829). Jackson's relationship with her own mother, Ruth Franklin notes, was a "poisonous" one in which Jackson was subjected to Geraldine's "belittling … all her life" (120). Franklin sees this tumultuous relationship as having a direct impact on Jackson's characterizations of women in that Jackson seems to have used her fictional world as a way, at least in part, to acknowledge her mother's cruelty (350). Jackson certainly does return to "poisonous" mothers repeatedly in her work, and her 1954 novel, The Bird's Nest, is no exception. While the novel may speak to Jackson's ambivalent feelings toward her own mother, at the same time Bird's Nest does have a broader potential feminist value. Jackson's novel [End Page 25] offers a fictionalized enactment of Freud's theories of female development during the "golden age" of psychoanalysis in America (Genter 137), a time in which motherhood itself was the subject of intense cultural scrutiny. Although the feminist value of Bird's Nest is not untroubled, Jackson's reliance on an underlying Freudian script opens up a space through which Bird's Nest imagines a maternal power, a potentiality that Freud insistently tries to repress in his own writing. In postwar America, the subject position of mother, informed by a popularization of a psychoanalytically inflected individual psychology and its attendant focus on the child's well-being, was identified as "the primary source[ ] of neurotic behaviour" (152). Mothering in midcentury America, as is the case in Jackson's text, is identified as the origin of filial psychosis. However, crafted as a dramatization of psychoanalytic theories of female subjectivity, maternity in The Bird's Nest ultimately reveals that psychoanalytic discourse relating to mothers and daughters is bound up with cultural notions of monstrosity. The Bird's Nest, considered Jackson's "best book" by biographer Judy Oppenheimer (161), recounts the story of Elizabeth Richmond, a young woman who suffers from "disintegrated personality" (Jackson 51). Darryl Hattenhauer—one of only a handful of critics to explore Bird's Nest—notes that Jackson sets a gothic tone from the start (119), employing, Hattenhauer suggests, the structure of Elizabeth's workplace—a museum with "an odd, and disturbingly apparent, list to the west" (Jackson 1)—as a metaphor for Elizabeth's collapsing self (119). Jackson's gothic narrative also has a psychoanalytic context from its opening moments. Construction at Elizabeth's workplace created a "hole the height of the building, from the roof to the cellar" beside Elizabeth's desk (Jackson 2–3), and as young woman hangs up her coat, she feels "an almost irresistible temptation to hurl herself downward into the primeval sands upon which the museum presumably stood" (3). Over the course of Elizabeth's treatment by Dr Wright, a psychologist hired by Elizabeth's Aunt Morgen when the caregiver can no longer cope with her niece's erratic behaviour, Elizabeth comes to understand that she has three "cruel sisters" (215)—independent personalities that live, and battle for existence, within her own body. Wright believes that the disintegration of Elizabeth's personality began with the death of her mother (63), and Jackson's narrative thereby evinces the same psychoanalytically informed cultural fascination with the mother's role in the child's subjectivity that characterizes a great deal of post–World War II fictional constructions of maternity. While Elizabeth's experiences recall those of Miss Christine Beauchamp, the subject of a...

Weekend Pilots: Technology, Masculinity, and Private Aviation in Postwar America by Alan Meyer

Weekend Pilots: Technology, Masculinity, and Private Aviation in Postwar America by Alan Meyer

Booms, Blooms, and Doom: The Life of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone

Booms, Blooms, and Doom:The Life of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone Jack E. Davis (bio) For fourteen weeks in the winter and early spring of 2016, snow and rain kept falling on the Midwestern states. There were a few dry days in between many wet ones, but the usual long spells failed to come. Weather trackers had never seen the Midwest escape drought for such an extended period. Not surprisingly, precipitation exceeded annual averages for much of the region. In April, eight inches of rain soaked northwestern Missouri, where no more than three were normal, and in the first two weeks of the month, snowfall in northern Ohio reached up to seventeen inches above average.1 Midwestern farmers welcomed the moistening of the soil, just as long as the rain stopped before the ground turned too muddy for planting. The rain stopped. By the first of May, the majority of the corn crop was in the ground, surpassing a five-year average, and soybeans were close behind. These were the region's principal cash crops. The growing season was off to a nice start. But what was good for farmers of the Midwest was bad for sea life down in the northern Gulf of Mexico, hundreds of miles from the growing fields. In June, a two-decker headline in Mother Jones warned that the Gulf "is about to experience a 'dead zone' the size of Connecticut," nearly 6,000 square miles. Typically, the seasonal dead [End Page 156] zone kept to Delaware dimensions, its length running the front of Louisiana, reaching toward Texas in one direction, Alabama in the other, and some 40 miles into the Gulf.2 Scientists discovered the Gulf of Mexico dead zone in the 1970s, as an annual summer event. Within a few years they tracked down its principal source to chemical fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi River drainage basin, which taps forty percent of the contiguous United States, a total of thirty–one states. The area includes the Midwest and most of the High Plains, America's agricultural heartland. Corn, the biggest crop in the region and a fertilizer hog, was the principal contributor to the Gulf's woes. In the twenty–first century, with the increased production of corn-based ethanol, scientists saw a spike in fertilizer use and in the size of the dead zone. From the beginning, the ethanol connection made interesting copy for the media. Federal assistance greatly expanded the additive's presence in the domestic fuel inventory, and scientists looking for answers to reducing the dead zone, operating on federal grants in many cases, were sobered by the eclipsing power of the marketplace. But there is an important backstory here that remains adrift from the news-generating narrative. Long before ethanol's ascendency, the dead zone came to life in postwar America and of age with the baby boom generation. A defining facet in the boomer experience was the changing culinary landscape, an overall distressing development for Americans and the Gulf together. The diet of the new generation spiraled away from nutritional goodness and took a fateful turn into rivers and streams in the direction of the Gulf. Ultimately, the diminishing physical health of Americans translated into the diminishing health of their backyard sea. ________ journalists came up with the name "dead zone" in the 1980s for what scientists were abstrusely calling hypoxic coastal waters. The oxygen level in such areas, some several hundred acres and others [End Page 157] several thousand square miles, periodically drops to a level too low to support marine life. The results are mass die offs of sea creatures, especially bottom dwellers. Behind the morbidity lies an excessive infusion of nutrients. The overloading stimulates phytoplankton blooms, and, eventually, all this new minuscule life begins to die and sink to the bottom, often with other decaying organic matter. Performing its custodial role in the ecosystem, bacteria steps in to break down the dead, generating carbon dioxide as it consumes massive quantities of oxygen, leaving sea creatures to suffocate. Dead zones are worldwide. Some are natural, others the fallout of human activities. The former have been around for time immemorial. Alabama's Mobile Bay...

Left Marginalia: The Radical Imagination in Postwar America

Left Marginalia: The Radical Imagination in Postwar America

Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America

Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America

The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America by Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Reviewed by: The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America by Gabriel N. Rosenberg Jennifer Robin Terry The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America. By Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. ix + 304 pp. Cloth $55, e-book $55. Gabriel Rosenberg’s study of the origins and development of 4-H, the largest and best-known youth-serving organization in America, firmly embeds the federal government within the heart of modern agrarian life. While readers may already be familiar with the ways that the federal government insinuated itself into the American landscape through Progressive Era conservation and New Deal agricultural policies, this study explains how the 4-H youth program also provided the federal government a conduit to family farms, served to condition American youth to partner with government programs, and “functioned as a mode of governance implemented through the bodies of participating children” (3). Grounded in research from archives across the nation, this ambitious work is an institutional history of the organization, an examination of the cultural interpretations of the agrarian political economy, and an intimate look at the interconnection of the human and nonhuman biopolitical frameworks involved in modern state building. [End Page 143] Through six chronological chapters, Rosenberg’s book demonstrates how the federal government influenced American society, and eventually the world, through children and youth’s activities. As such, the 4-H program may be understood as a precursor to the sort of federal intervention that Marilyn Irvin Holt writes of in Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (2014). Rosenberg explains how the federal government, through the United States Department of Agriculture and the agricultural extension service, partnered with modern agrarian scientists, home economists, and social welfare reformers to modernize farms, combat perceived rural degeneracy, and strengthen the nation through healthy farm families. In so doing, the federal government gained acknowledgment as a cultural and scientific authority throughout rural America. Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, Rosenberg explains, children’s agricultural programs were used to reach out to farmers and their wives who were otherwise resistant to modernization. In supporting their children’s activities, parents were then exposed to scientifically proven best practices in animal husbandry, crop cultivation, and domestic homemaking. Agricultural clubs served to bridge the gap between home and school, providing vocational training that was meant to stem the tide of population drift toward cities by reinvigorating agrarian life with modern import. 4-H projects introduced boys to capital-intensive projects that often required debt financing. This helped to condition young farmers and their families to the notion of debt for the sake of progress while it also created and strengthened ties between farmers, bankers, and retailers under the guise of community building. The clubs also trained girls in the art of modern homemaking and ostensibly infused excitement into otherwise banal activities. By the 1930s, children’s 4-H activities had become an unapologetic extension of the federal government as children were taught to assist parents in understanding the intricacies of New Deal agricultural policies, such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act. As well, Rosenberg explains, clubs became sites of heterosexual socialization in order to encourage positive eugenic efforts to curtail the crisis of reproduction that threatened to undermine rural America. Through club activities, prescriptive literature, and health contests that “scrutinized bodies and quantif[ied] copious ‘defects,’” (104) 4-H’ers learned to examine and document their health, physique, and emotional well-being just as they would score and record livestock, vegetation, or domestic projects. 4-H met the uncertainties of World War II with activities and literature that focused on rituals of belonging. Yet, it was through the organization’s patriotic literature, and at national 4-H conferences, Rosenberg writes, that the inconsistencies and contradictions of the organization’s racially discriminatory policies became starkly apparent. The club’s focus on producing young bodies suitable for labor [End Page 144] and national sacrifice centered on contrasts between healthy, white, American bodies and those of “depleted foreign bodies” (171). Rosenberg moves from the local to the global in the last chapter and epilogue. Like recent studies such as Daniel Immerwahr’s...

A Community of Suffering: Jewish Holocaust Survivor Networks in Postwar America

Within months of arriving in the United States in 1946, Jewish Holocaust survivors began to organize themselves to help with the process of resettlement. The small band of socialists who established the Farband fun Geveyzene Yidishe Katsetler un Partizaner (United Jewish Survivors of Nazi Persecution) initiated a dual process of identity formation and memorialization of the Holocaust. The first survivor network founded in the United States, the Katsetler Farband developed a memorial culture that included commemorations and publications, replete with its own rituals and calendar. Moreover, the organization was part of a broader process of defining what experiences constituted the Holocaust and who was to be considered a survivor. Ultimately, they were among a host of survivor networks in the United States to lay the foundation for Holocaust memorialization.

Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State

Pensions and ProtestFormer Slaves and the Reconstructed American State Dale Kretz (bio) A chilling wind tore through central Georgia in the winter of 1865. Huddled in tents near Atlanta was the 138th U.S. Colored Troops, organized nearby just months before. One of the last black regiments formed in the Civil War, it drew its numbers from the formerly enslaved populations fleeing plantations in the wake of Sherman's March. One unhappy night, the icy current ripped a tent away from its stakes, leaving exposed a man who would endure the consequences for sixty-five years. As a slave, he had been known as Anderson Odom. Now he was Anderson Freeman. After escaping Jack Odom's plantation at age twenty, Freeman had made the one-hundred-mile journey northward through Georgia from Columbus to Atlanta, where he enlisted in the 138th USCT in July 1865. Following the winter storm, he could not walk for nearly a month. He spent that time in his quarters, treated by the regimental surgeon. He would walk again but would always be left with rheumatism, a broad nineteenth-century term for a range of arthritic symptoms. When Freeman was forty-four, he applied for a pension from the U.S. government, alleging he was "still suffering from the effects" and "cannot perform the labor of an able bodied man caused by my exposure in the service of the U.S. Army." A board of federally deputized physicians measured every part of the former slave's body, concluding rheumatism had disabled him 4/18ths for the performance of manual labor and therefore merited a pension.1 Anderson Freeman was one of hundreds of thousands of freedpeople who came into contact with the federal government in the four decades after the Civil War.2 They did so by actively pursuing military pensions through the U.S. Pension Bureau. In the past two decades, historians have used USCT pension files as an invaluable window into African American experiences of slavery, war, and freedom. Most notably, they have used them to explore social and work relations in slavery; the experiences of soldiers and veterans; and the politics of sex, family, and citizenship.3 This article attempts to situate the pension struggles of former slaves within [End Page 425] the larger project of state building embodied by the U.S. Pension Bureau.4 Indeed, the pension files of former slaves allow us to reconceptualize fundamental assumptions about the federal government and the aftermath of emancipation in America. The post-Reconstruction era is conventionally narrated in terms of exclusion. The federal government, betraying the revolutionary promise of wartime abolition, soon abandoned the cause of freedpeople, essentially leaving them to their own devices in the sharecropping South without meaningful access to or support from the federal state. Widespread disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and the rise of Jim Crow all negated the constitutional rights of African Americans. And so, though not without good reason, even as scholars uncover extraordinary grassroots movements in the rural South, African Americans are still largely painted as outsiders to the state building projects of postwar America. This article challenges the conventional narrative by detailing the extensive interactions that formerly enslaved veterans had with federal officials of the Pension Bureau.5 Freeborn veterans of black state regiments and the USCT, as well as their widows, had always been officially included in the application process for federal pensions. For a decade, however, formerly enslaved veterans of the USCT faced legal prohibition. Yet on March 3, 1873, Congress passed a vitally important act consolidating procedures and increasing pension rates. One provision of that bill stipulated that every pensioner listed as a slave on his regiment's rolls "shall be on the same footing as to bounty and pension as though they had not been slaves at the date of their enlistment."6 On the surface, the Consolidation Act of 1873 was one of great generosity, finally securing the extension of justly earned benefits to the most dispossessed of veterans and widows. In the words of the bill's spokesman in Congress, "if any one class of our soldiers deserve more at our hands than any other, it is that class which...