Postwar America Research Articles

“You're a Bigger Man”: Technology and Agrarian Masculinity in Postwar America

“You're a Bigger Man”: Technology and Agrarian Masculinity in Postwar America

Peace through Suffering: Human Resilience and Viet Nam War Literature

Peace through Suffering: Human Resilience and Viet Nam War Literature Erin R. McCoy (bio) The Viet Nam1 War (1955–1975) marked a turbulent time in American culture. The othering of the enemy coupled with America’s status as a victor in World War II colored lenses of political, cultural, and social views in post-war America. But a perpetual victor America was not, and the Viet Nam War brought undue division and despair to the nation’s identity and psyche that lasted decades. In a 1980 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Ronald Reagan referred to the United States’ aversion to war as a product of “Vietnam Syndrome,” where a “noble cause” was marred by the propaganda-fueled aggression of the North Vietnamese (Reagan). According to Reagan and others, the nation’s trepidation regarding entering into conflict stemmed from a guilt-like hangover from the Viet Nam War experience. Though a common thread in war literature is individual and collective suffering, how these are expressed in literature about the Viet Nam War is simultaneously unique to its situation and common in its commentary on the continuity of war as a part of the human experience. What unites literature of the experience of the Viet Nam War are shared themes of human suffering and the quest for individual peace. In his survey of the Viet Nam War legacy, Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Than Nguyen’s opens with the observation, “All wars are fought twice; the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” (4). American Literature About the Viet Nam War The bulk of early United States literature about Viet Nam either analyzed the failures of the French or criticized American involvement in the war. Prior to the Viet Nam War, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American (published on the eve of American involvement in Viet Nam), made pointed references to early American involvement in France’s Indochina Wars. The book’s primary tension is between a British journalist and American CIA operative over the affections of a girl named Phuong; however, that tension acts as an extended metaphor of the incoming American experience in the country, an experience characterized by frustration, cruelty, and suffering. Books about Viet Nam published during the war, like Bernard B. Fall’s Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (1961) and Hell is a Very [End Page 155] Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (1966), focused on the many failings of French colonialism. They did little in regard to representing Vietnamese people or culture. Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968) detailed the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. He had already penned his treatise Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), stoking anti-war fires in the United States. Noam Chomsky added fuel to the anti-war fire with American Power and the New Mandarins(1969), as did John Rowe with Count Your Dead (1968). At the same time, more traditionally patriotic and battle-centered works, like Robin Moore’s The Green Berets (1965), also sold well during the early years of the war. A notable exception to the 1960s-era literature about the war is Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1968). Herr’s book is one of the first journalistic accounts of the war, and it is a chaotic, hazy read. The journalist’s memories and renderings of the war are bleak--he makes clear that in its earliest stages, the war made little sense to those reporting on it. Herr also offers a window into Vietnamese culture. More urgently, his unique inside/outside perspective on the war warns readers about the emotional suffering that would become the Viet Nam War’s legacy. Because the Viet Nam War continued into the 1970s, as did conflicts at home regarding the United States’ involvement in it, individuals who had been part of the war began to write about it while it continued. As a result of the emergence of empirical storytelling, Viet Nam became less of a war and more of a country to American readers. Increasingly, there appeared more “front line,” or first-person accounts from Viet Nam written by those who had directly...

Place, People, and Power in City Building in Postwar America

Place, People, and Power in City Building in Postwar America

Petrodocumentary and the Remaking of New Deal Culture

Petrodocumentary and the Remaking of New Deal Culture Molly Geidel (bio) In 1942 Assistant Attorney General Thurman W. Arnold launched an investigation into Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ)'s relationship with the German petrochemical company IG Farben. Not only had SONJ profited from their association, he argued, but the corporations' agreements were depriving the United States of badly needed synthetic rubber during the war. Arnold appeared before the Senate Committee on National Defense, after which then senator Harry Truman told a reporter "I think this approaches treason." As the war progressed, new revelations piled up indicating that SONJ had allowed Germany to gain a wartime advantage.1 Opinion polls reflected this scandal, showing, among other things, that Standard Oil was the US public's least favorite corporation.2 It was not just government scrutiny and national sentiment that seemed to be damaging US oil companies' reputations: in both the United States and oil-producing Latin American countries, workers and governments were pushing back against foreign corporations in more concrete ways. The Bolivian and Mexican governments had nationalized their oil industries in 1937 and 1938, and even in friendlier Venezuela, workers pressed a newly responsive government to allow workers and citizens a greater share of oil profits, recognizing, as Fernando Coronil writes, "that the subsoil was national property and that the role of the state was to safeguard this property on behalf of the collectivity."3 The United States, for its part, witnessed its first nationwide oil-worker strike in September 1945, beginning with Michigan refinery workers and ultimately encompassing forty-three thousand workers in twenty states.4 US oil companies may have been large, but in that moment they seemed neither stable nor popular. By the end of the decade, however, things looked different. The US government quickly backed down from prosecuting SONJ for its collaboration with IG Farben and in 1945 called in the military to break the nationwide strike. In the late 1940s, under the auspices of Cold War security, the US government consolidated a foreign policy that, as David Painter argues, entailed unwavering "public support for and nonintervention in the private [End Page 797] operations of the major oil companies," along with sometimes-covert intervention abroad to secure those companies' ongoing access to the world's oil.5 Domestically, as New Deal drilling controls and housing and highway construction policies took effect, "petromodernity" reached its classic form within the built environment, and the United States entered what Matthew Huber calls "the postwar period of naïve petro-capitalism."6 Beyond these infrastructural changes, in Frederick Buell's evocative description, "wartime petrochemistry was reworked into the chemical equivalent of ploughshares." Oil, Buell explains, "changed into what people dressed in, evacuated into, viewed, and even ate, not just what they put into their power machinery. … Bodies became literally oily, in what they ate, and in the cosmetics and clothes they put on; pharmaceuticals began doing the same thing for minds."7 This essay contends that this exculpation and expansion of the petroleum industries, which looks like a smooth process only in retrospect, was helped along by a series of photography and film campaigns on behalf of the US oil and transportation industries. Rather than directly promote themselves or particular petroleum products, oil corporations undertook the more ambitious project of creating "symbols of ideal life," in John Dewey's evocative phrase.8 They did this by enlisting celebrated documentary administrators and artists to produce visions of oil extraction as both good work and harmonious nature–machine integration, imagining a postwar America characterized by cleanliness and abundance while promising Latin American countries a similar future. Working for Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of American Affairs (OCIAA) and SONJ, as well as for auto barons such as Alfred and Harold Sloan, these 1940s documentary cultural workers drew on the frontier-nostalgic, sociological, and even workerist social protest sensibilities honed in the milieu of New Deal agencies and the 1930s Left, brightening and simplifying these sensibilities to produce lively, hopeful visions of an oilpowered world. Directed deliberately at an educated professional class, these images and narratives not only countered critics' charges that oil extraction was dirty, dangerous, and (for US...

The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America

The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America

Bernard Malamud Revisited: Portrait of the Post-Holocaust Jewish Hero in the Fixer

The primary focus of this article is concept of Jewish heroism in Bernard Malamud’s most celebrated novel, The Fixer (1966). In light of a truth-oriented historicist approach, my underlying argument is that Malamud’s protagonists are Jewish heroes who befit the post-Holocaust era. They are not schlemiels, unlike what many critics believe, and have three main missions: first, to remind the world of the suffering the Jews have endured throughout history, especially during the alleged Holocaust; second, to revive the qualities of Jewishness and Jewish tradition that no longer existed among the younger Jewish generation of the postwar America; and third, to help the Jews free themselves from their victim mentality, intensified after the Holocaust, through heroic acts of resistance and acceptance of responsibility toward their people. These protagonists neither share America’s postwar upheavals, nor resemble the least to the affluent Wall Street Jew financers. They are typical post-Holocaust Jewish heroes.

Before Wild Things: Maurice Sendak and the Postwar Jewish American Child as Queer Insider-Outsider

Abstract This article analyzes the late Maurice Sendak’s (1928–2012) entry into the field of children’s picture books in the midtwentieth century and his contribution to the affective shift in children’s literature. It examines Sendak’s complex social position and artistic development in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as lesser-known illustrations by Sendak, including collaborations with Ruth Krauss and with the artist’s brother, Jack. These works began to respond to Sendak’s own childhood as a queer son of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking immigrants. They also offered new potential mirrors for midcentury children—perhaps especially queer and otherwise marginalized children—as they navigated cultural gaps between home and the public sphere, as well as between personal orientations and the social pressures of postwar America.

Technology adoption, capital deepening, and international productivity differences

I document that cross-country differences in capital intensity are much larger in the agricultural sector than in the nonagricultural sector. To explain this fact, I build a model featuring technology adoption with fixed costs among heterogeneous farmers. More productive farmers operating larger farms pay the fixed cost and adopt a modern capital-intensive technology, while less productive ones choose a traditional labor-intensive technology. The model is calibrated using historical data on farmer adoption of mechanized technology in postwar America. This calibrated model is then employed to perform cross-country comparisons. Incorporating a technology adoption channel not only allows the model to predict substantial differences in agricultural capital intensity between rich and poor countries that an otherwise identical model would fall short in generating, but also improve explanatory power for cross-country agricultural productivity differences by 1.5-fold.

Clearance, Choreography, and Community Action: Reconsiderations of Postwar America

Clearance, Choreography, and Community Action: Reconsiderations of Postwar America

"Act thin, stay thin": Commercialization, behavior modification, and group weight control.

In 1968, Weight Watchers International introduced behavior modification practices to their established commercial program. At the time, the addition of behavioral psychology gave Weight Watchers a distinct advantage over the many competing weight control groups in postwar America. The process of combining group therapy with a controlled diet plan, behavior techniques and later, exercise, has significantly influenced American popular culture. This article considers how the commercialization of group weight control impacted the development and dissemination of a new multidimensional approach for weight management and how this has shaped popular ideas associated with dieting and wider understandings of healthy living.

Asymmetric issue evolution in the American gun rights debate

Issue Evolution is a rare form of voter realignment where a single issue drives massive partisan shifts. These types of realignment occurred regarding race relations in post-war America, and regarding reproductive rights beginning in the mid-1980s. The current American gun rights debate meets the requisite conditions for issue evolution: longevity, salience, and ease of acquisition. Opposition to gun rights requires organization, attention, and political activity, whereas visible support for gun rights can be as simple as owning a firearm; the expression of advocacy for this issue is inherently asymmetric. This paper presents seven decades of persistent national polling (N = 79,608) alongside Congressional voting records that portray steady partisan divergence and asymmetric support slowly shifting towards gun rights, away from gun control. The gradual process by which new voters have joined the Republican Party on the merits of gun rights foreshadows an enduring association between gun rights and the Republican Party.

The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America. By Romain D. Huret, translated by John Angell. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 246. $38.94, hardcover.

The Experts’ War on Poverty: Social Research and the Welfare Agenda in Postwar America. By Romain D. Huret, translated by John Angell. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. 246. $38.94, hardcover.

Stuart Hall's Discursive Turn

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.

Black Skin, Red Masks: Racism, Communism and the Quest of Subjectivity in Ralph Ellison’ Invisible Man

This essay aims at proposing a study of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), where the author focuses on the difficult journey of black intellectuals in quest for a strong black identity in post-war America. The theoretical reflection in this paper is based, in a first phase, on the philosophical and political perspectives of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Frantz Fanon, whose works and debates have articulated an important source to understand the quest of subjectivity and intellectual consciousness in the 1950s, a period marked not only by the emergence of civil rights movement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also the progressive replacement of Communism by alternative emancipatory currents such as existentialism, postcolonialism and (post-) structuralism. From this discussion, the essay indicates, how (post-) Marxist thinkers, like Etienne Balibar, investigate the limits of the a priori paradigms promoted by the traditional humanistic (natural law-positive law) and communist narratives (alienation-emancipation), which lack conceptual and historical efficacy when it comes to understand and respond to new (bio-capitalist) forms of discrimination, which constantly evolve according to the epoch and the place.

Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Christopher W. Wells. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. xx + 308 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.00.

Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Christopher W. Wells. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. xx + 308 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, and index. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.00.

“Sei a mensch”: Mezz Mezzrow’s Jewish Hipster Autobiography Really The Blues and the Ironies of the Color Line

Abstract Jewish jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography Really the Blues (1946), co-written with Bernard Wolfe, has received some critical attention to date, most of which concerns the book’s depiction of white-to-black passing, its display and discussion of jive, and its construction of the white Jewish hipster as a countercultural figure in postwar America. Building on existing studies, this essay revisits these themes in order to foreground two largely unacknowledged aspects: a) the book’s encapsulation of Whitmanesque “American multitudes”, i. e., its attempt to reflect the internal diversity and multiplicity of U. S. culture, which complicates the autobiography’s frequent compression of the black-white-Jewish triad into a more convenient black-white binary; b) and its significance as one of the earliest extended postwar American Jewish reflections on World War II and the atrocities of Nazi Germany. All of these elements – the passing narrative, the promotion of the hipster ethic, the linguistics of jive, the encapsulation of multiplicity, and the immediate postwar context – must be considered together in order to unravel the autobiography’s investigation of, and simultaneous complicity in, the racial paradoxes that continue to haunt color-conscious America.

Fine-Grained Analysis: Talk Therapy, Media, and the Microscopic Science of the Face-to-Face

“Mechanical objectivity,” which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison trace to the mid-nineteenth century, often coincided with efforts to inscribe nature “directly,” such as through automatic registering machines. But what did this inscription entail? Addressing this question requires that we reexamine indexicalization: the shift in semiotic ideology whereby medial technologies are imagined and acted on as if they preserved material traces of the real. Indexicalization is no simple reflex of mechanical objectivity and is more varied and consequential than commonly imagined. This essay demonstrates this by returning to the sciences of face-to-face interaction, which crystallized in postwar America but drew inspiration from earlier research on talk therapy. Returning to efforts to record psychoanalysis sessions in the early 1930s “objectively,” it chronicles a shift in the technosemiotic mediation of knowledge. Whereas transcripts were originally “verbatim” records of literal content, researchers came to seek tacit, symptomological signs. And whereas mechanical recording was introduced to avoid an observer effect, it was later deemed necessary to preserve indexical traces for fine-grained analysis. This indexicalization had ontological as well as epistemological effects, and it was inspired not by mechanical objectivity but by the parallel capacities of the perceptive psychoanalyst and the receptive mechanical recorder, both virtuosic in registering the indexical richness of the communicative unconscious.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius, Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, September 2017–March 2018; Stephen F. Eisenman, ed., <i>William Blake and the Age of Aquarius</i>

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” Thus Wordsworth looked back at the heady days of Paris in 1789 from the vantage point of 1805. Such nostalgia, of course, is a hallmark of Romanticism. Nor is it a simple recollection, but a multilayered process of memory: in this case, Wordsworth looks back at a time of looking forward, much as Blake writes in 1793 a “prophecy” of America in 1776. Then there is the memory of memory, as in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” where the speaker remembers how a remembered scene has sustained him in the intervening five years. In the 1799 Prelude, he turns back to his earliest memories—“Was it for this?”—in an attempt to resolve his writer’s block. Looking backward in order to move forward is a quintessentially Romantic exercise, one complicated further by the uncertainty of imagining what “might will have been,” as Emily Rohrbach has shown (2). Such was the case when I visited William Blake and the Age of Aquarius at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, curated by Stephen F. Eisenman. The exhibition explored how and why Blake became a role model for artistic revolutionaries in postwar America, building up to the countercultural upheaval of the 1960s. But this was not a straightforward study of one-way influence in which Blake served as background. In the catalogue, Lisa G. Corrin, director of the Block Museum, expresses “hope that seeing Blake against the backdrop of the ‘Age of Aquarius’ will enable us to reconnect to the radicalism of this iconic figure and to find in his multidimensional contributions meaning for our own tumultuous times” (vii). As Eisenman adds, “the products of both periods are potentially valuable resources for social movements still to come” (6). In a Romantic act of meta-recall, this exhibition recalls the recollection of Blake. Back in 1995, Morris Eaves referred to Blake’s perennial status as “the sign of something new about to happen” (414). That “something new” begins, as ever, with a Romantic glance backward.

Environmental risk narratives in historical perspective: from early warnings to ‘risk society’ blame

The ‘storying’ of risk is an important and neglected dimension and narratives such as ‘nuclear catastrophism’ have powerfully framed experience and acquired considerable independence, with ‘what might have been’ becoming inseparable from as real as what actually did. This article builds upon limited earlier risk narrative research, focusing upon their historical development in the United States and UK. Analysis proceeds from an understanding of risk as a tool that brings together an understanding of threats, what is threatened and how that might be remedied in the future, increasingly based upon past experience. Risk narratives emerge historically with the growth of concern for the public impact of environmental events, through individuals recognising these in secular terms, prepared to warn others and, later, challenge denial of institutional responsibility. But the explicit language of environmental risk only emerges in post-war America through public challenges to fluoridation, pesticides and consumer safety, the article arguing that we can approximately distinguish ‘risk society’ narratives concerned with human-made threat and an assumption of corporate and institutional responsibility, focused upon victims and blame for their condition. This singular focus can be problematic in its impact upon victims themselves in the case of nuclear catastrophism, however. A concluding suggestion is that if narrative is to be used in risk communication, it will require more sophisticated forms that go beyond only exposing risk, insisting upon blame and inferring limitless harm.

Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of American Airports by Anke Ortlepp

Reviewed by: Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of American Airports by Anke Ortlepp Christopher Schaberg Anke Ortlepp. Jim Crow Terminals: The Desegregation of American Airports. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2017. 216 pp. $26.95. This fascinating study covers the history of the rise and fall of segregated airports in the U. S. South from the late 1940s to the early '60s. Ortlepp "conceives of airport terminals as sites of conflict—as territories of confrontation over the renegotiation of racial identities in postwar America" (10). For civil rights activists, but also for African American travelers trying merely to exercise their citizenship and consumer status, "the airport terminal was new protest territory" (37). Tracing a series of legal cases and drawing on oral histories and government documents, Ortlepp paints a vivid picture of how civil rights debates played out inconsistently (and often indirectly) around the planning, construction, and operation of new terminals throughout the Southern United States in the postwar period. Jim Crow Terminals complicates any easy linear notion of social progress with regard to the development of commercial air travel. The unfair treatment of passengers based on their skin color—enforced around airport restaurants, waiting areas, restrooms, and drinking fountains—reveals how local customs and ingrained political attitudes ensnared and tarnished the promises of smooth transit by air. The snapshots of mistreatment and racialized Othering are consistent with other more familiar civil rights flashpoints (such as buses), but the built environment of the airport exposes an intriguing irony. While white supremacists saw airports as more or less natural extensions of their local regions (and thereby places in which to automatically maintain segregated practices), zooming out slightly showed airports in their connective capacity to be exploding parochial regionalisms in favor of a [End Page 117] more inclusive modernity. Court cases concerning the integration of these terminals were always necessarily (eventually) taking this zoomed out view—which was precisely what air travel was facilitating more broadly, as the very creation of the FAA in 1958 suggests. So Ortlepp offers the compelling observation that "emotionally, legally, and practically, the airport terminal was one of the weakest bastions of southern white resistance" (137). While Southern white supremacists may have assumed that airport construction projects were a way to double down on and bolster their (Southern) identity (including segregation), in fact the modern airport terminal became a significant part of the unraveling of such practices. One of the most curious minor details in Jim Crow Terminals is the reoccurring function of the delay. Numerous cases cited in the book wherein a traveler is either denied service or offered a separate dining area are triggered by the occasion of a delayed flight: "When the return flight of her business trip from New York to Washington was delayed…" (16); "Faced with a delay…" (39); "While waiting for a delayed flight…" (67); "While waiting for his delayed connecting flight…" (69). Each of these unplanned, extra temporalities at an airport results in an altercation or confrontation in which segregation is implemented—and then called out. In other words, one of the banes of air travel—the dreaded delay—in a bizarre way ends up aiding the desegregation of Jim Crow terminals. Hiding in plain sight here is a quite radical reconceptualization of one of modernity's most annoying low-grade glitches: time to kill becomes time for social justice. Toward the end of the book, Ortlepp discusses how the desegregation of the Jim Crow terminals depended on the acceptance of a "broad definition of 'air carrier,' which included airports and all necessary supportive services to air commerce" (129). Not only were the physical realities of these particular airports being changed—signs saying "WHITE" and "COLORED" removed; separate seating areas in restaurants rendered illegal—but air travel itself was undergoing a conceptual shift, spreading out into seemingly detached parts of modern life. One wonders if the imprecision of "all necessary support services" was lost on the lawmakers, or if the capaciousness of this phrase was intentionally strategic. As if to say there is no such thing as a simple "terminal" where things end when it comes to civil rights. Everywhere, concourses instead. Living under the murky shadow of Donald Trump...