American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  In 1954, President Eisenhower, who after an adult lifetime of nonattendance began regularly going to church upon taking office, backed the successful effort to add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. (The promotion of the idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” helped paper over the question of just what god the nation was putting itself under.) Later Eisenhower ordered “In God We Trust”—which Congress had declared the national motto—added to paper money (coins had carried the phrase since the Civil War). The armed services embraced religion too. Military leaders found it a useful tool for improving the behavior, discipline, and morale of their troops and projecting a clean-cut image to the public (rather than the hard-drinking, carousing reputation that the peacetime military had had in the past). In 1947, the Air Force began requiring all of its uniformed personnel to watch a series of religious films. Military chaplains increasingly came from evangelical denominations, which saw chaplaincy as a way to act on anticommunist beliefs while countering the influence of Catholics and liberal Protestants on American youth.

  Official rhetoric and popular belief mirrored one another. Countless Americans of all faiths assumed that the struggle of the United States against the Soviet Union represented a battle between good and evil, not simply a contest between competing national interests, with their country acting on God’s side. For many, this moral and spiritual dimension justified the heavy cost of battling communism in Korea, at home, and around the world. Religion helped give meaning to the long, frustrating struggle.

  Ike

  While most Americans, at least at first, accepted the necessity of the fighting in Korea, they did not like the war, especially as it dragged on, with the chance for anything more than a return to the prewar status gone and U.S. soldiers continuing to die in large numbers. The Truman administration’s lack of strategy for either outright victory or disengagement contributed to the president’s plummeting popularity. So did his seeming indifference to a series of corruption and influence-peddling scandals that plagued his second term. Inflation and high taxes, in part the result of the Korean War and the broader anticommunist effort, further diminished support for the president. Privately, Truman pretty much ruled out seeking another term well before the 1952 election, but he allowed his name to be entered into the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the first in the country. An embarrassing defeat to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver closed his options, leading him to announce that he would not run again. Adlai Stevenson, the liberal governor of Illinois, won the nomination with Truman’s support.

  Among Republicans, the ongoing divide between East Coast moderates and midwestern conservatives again defined the contest for the presidential nomination. Robert Taft had the greatest support among party activists, but his more liberal opponents succeeded in recruiting as their standard-bearer Dwight Eisenhower, who was immensely popular thanks to his military record and nonpartisan demeanor. After besting Taft at the Republican convention, Eisenhower picked as his vice presidential running mate Richard Nixon, whose internationalist views on foreign policy generally coincided with the Dewey wing of the party but whose staunch anticommunism made him a conservative favorite.

  As the campaign unfolded, Korea emerged as the leading issue. Though Eisenhower changed his position on the war several times, his pledge to make ending it his number one priority, his promise to personally visit Korea, and his military background gave him an edge over Stevenson, who defended Truman’s handling of the war. Boosted by his personal popularity, Eisenhower easily won the popular vote and carried the Electoral College by a landslide, even prevailing in four southern states, the best Republican showing in the region since 1928. Republican congressional candidates, including such leading anticommunists as McCarthy and Jenner, generally ran behind the national ticket, but the party managed to just barely win control of both houses of Congress.

  As the first Republican president in twenty years, Eisenhower sought a smaller government, less involved in regulating the economy and everyday life. Like many conservatives, he wanted to transfer some power from Washington back to the states. But he did not reject wholesale the revolutionary expansion in the functions of the federal government that had come with the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. His decision at the start of his presidency not to try to undo the basic social welfare measures of the New Deal cemented the outcome of the postwar political and class contests, keeping in place the basic reform measures of the Roosevelt years but not further expanding the limited welfare state they created. Populating his cabinet with corporate executives, Eisenhower’s moderate, pro-business policies sparked liberal and labor opposition, but his acceptance of the basic contours of the evolved social order took many of the most contentious domestic issues of the past off the political agenda. Some of Eisenhower’s bitterest critics were on his right, conservatives deeply disappointed that the Republican capture of the White House and Congress did not lead to the dismantling of the New Deal.

  Eisenhower faced conservative criticism over foreign policy as well. He generally supported the Cold War policies that the Truman administration had put into place and rejected the idea—though not always clearly, in public—that postwar communist gains had been the result of Democratic treachery. Also, he wanted the presidency to retain its dominant role in foreign policy. This put him at odds with conservative congressional Republicans who objected to the priority given to defending and bolstering Europe and who feared that the United Nations and the country’s growing web of international alliances would diminish the sovereignty of the American people.

  The battle came to a head over the so-called Bricker Amendment. Introduced by Senator John Bricker (John Gunther wrote of him, “Intellectually he is like interstellar space—a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés”), the proposed constitutional amendment would have limited the enforceability of international agreements within the United States, not allowing them to go beyond the constitutional limits on domestic legislation and requiring acts of Congress to put them into effect. Though what practical consequences the amendment would have remained unclear, symbolically the measure was an attack on internationalism, the power of the presidency, and, after the fact, the Yalta agreement, which many conservatives blamed for the communist control of Eastern Europe. To Eisenhower’s dismay, Bricker’s amendment quickly won the support of almost every Republican senator, major veterans’ and business groups, southern politicians fearful that UN human rights provisions would mandate desegregation, and members of his own cabinet. After a bitter battle that lasted well over a year, the Senate rejected the amendment only because Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson decided that it was in the Democratic interest to ally with the president to defeat it.

  While the Democrats helped Eisenhower win the battle over the general direction of foreign policy, Stalin helped the president with his greatest immediate challenge, ending the Korean War, by dropping dead. Upon taking office, Eisenhower rejected the military’s plan for a new ground offensive in Korea, but he sent various signals that the United States would escalate the war if a settlement did not come soon. Stalin’s death in early March 1953 made that unnecessary. The new Soviet leadership immediately launched a “peace initiative” to lessen international tensions, with Premier Georgy Malenkov saying at Stalin’s funeral, “There are no contested issues in U.S.-Soviet relations that cannot be resolved by peaceful means.”

  After the Soviets and Chinese agreed among themselves to try to bring the Korean War to a rapid conclusion, armistice negotiations resumed in late March on the basis of a new Chinese proposal that no longer insisted on the immediate repatriation of all prisoners of war, whether or not they wanted to go home. The United States, still not satisfied with the terms, intensified the air war, bombing irrigation dams in North Korea to flood the rice fields and create food shortages. But growing dismay among its allies over U.S. inflexibility, along with recognition of the costs and diff
iculties of a new general offensive, led the Eisenhower administration to reverse course and make concessions of its own in late May. At that point Syngman Rhee, who had no desire to end the war with the north outside his control, tried to sabotage the negotiations, which had reached a tentative agreement that POWs who did not want to be repatriated would be handed over to an international commission. To make that impossible, Rhee unilaterally released some twenty-five thousand North Korean and Chinese prisoners. In spite of this provocation, with the major powers now all wanting the war over, an armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, that divided the north and south along the current battle line, giving the south somewhat more territory than before the start of the war. A conference the following year to address long-term Korean political issues failed to make progress toward reunification, leaving the peninsula divided between two hostile states with little contact with each other. Both China and the United States kept troops in Korea through the late 1950s, when the Chinese withdrew and the United States reduced its force but armed it with atomic weapons.

  The “New Look”

  The end of the Korean War brought to a close the most dangerous, expensive, and ideologically charged phase of the Cold War (though in the early 1960s a series of confrontations once again raised the specter of all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union). Even though tensions eased, the United States did not militarily demobilize. Instead, it remained in a state of high readiness, with a draft in place and a quantity of social resources allocated to war-making capacity that was unprecedented for peacetime. As a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), military spending did not return to the pre–Korean War level until the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War.

  Even in peacetime, militarism shaped the pattern of American economic, technological, and geographic development. Military activities blocked off huge tracts of land from public use and polluted the soil, air, and water. (During the Cold War, in the United States, as in the Soviet Union, the military was the biggest single polluter, for the most part exempt from regulation and scrutiny in the name of national security.) In parts of the country with extensive military facilities, the military and military contractors helped set the cultural and political tone. In Washington, military leaders, the defense industries they sustained (and often went to work for upon retiring), and congressmen seeking military spending in their districts formed a political juggernaut (Eisenhower called it the “delta of power”) that kept military appropriations high and initiated the development of many costly, unneeded, technically flawed weapons systems.

  Yet even as militarism played an unprecedented peacetime role, the country did not become the garrison state that many feared. In the 1950s, a person walking around an American city or driving through the countryside would have been less likely to see soldiers in uniform or military installations than in many other parts of the communist and noncommunist worlds, from China to France. The military almost never directly got involved in electoral politics, and career military men, with the large exception of Eisenhower himself, rarely held top government positions.

  A deep-rooted hostility to federal power, high taxes, and centralized planning, lodged primarily within the Republican Party, mitigated the Cold War trend toward a militarized society and command economy. The broad support for the Bricker Amendment, as well as the demand from powerful figures like Robert Taft for steep cuts in defense spending, reflected substantial elite reservations about the national security state. So did the decision to keep control over civil defense preparedness in civilian hands, largely at the state and local level, and not fund a proposed massive fallout shelter program. Many conservatives who earlier in the century had supported the spread of U.S. power through arms in the Philippines and Latin America did not have the stomach for what it took to maintain a global military presence, fearing that high taxes and a powerful state apparatus would undermine the very republican values they held dear.

  Over his long Army career, Eisenhower had worked to deepen the ties between the military and business, and as president he opposed efforts to restrict federal power. Nonetheless, he too remained skeptical of the Cold War arms buildup and the militarization of American life. Eisenhower fought hard to reduce military spending from the levels called for by the Truman administration. Motivated in large part by a desire to lower the cost of military power (“more bang for the buck”), the Eisenhower administration introduced a “New Look” military strategy that called for increased dependence on strategic bombing, nuclear weapons, military aid to allies, and covert action, all cheaper alternatives to maintaining a massive ground force.

  Eisenhower spoke eloquently about the costs and perils of militarization. In a speech responding to the 1953 Soviet peace initiative, he cataloged the social price of military spending: “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants. . . . We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.” The Cold War arms race, he concluded was “not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Eight years later, in his farewell address, Eisenhower warned of the dangers of what he called the military-industrial complex: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.”

  But Eisenhower succeeded only in modestly checking defense spending and ended up presiding over the elaboration of the very political and social arrangements he warned against. The New Look, with its stress on nuclear weapons and covert action, turned over inordinate power to an elite of scientists, engineers, and military managers whose activities few Americans could understand, let alone judge or control, and to secret operatives, whose activities most Americans did not even know of, far from the return to republican values many conservative critics of Cold War militarism professed to embrace. The United States did not become a garrison state, but in subtler ways militarism permeated society. At its zenith of power, the United States, as sociologist and left-wing critic C. Wright Mills put it, simultaneously had a “permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy,” as the quests for national security, international power, personal autonomy, and unregulated corporate capitalism lived in complex tension with one another.

  McCarthy Falls, McCarthyism Continues

  Like militarization, anticommunism declined in intensity with the end of the Korean War but remained a pervasive presence. McCarthy himself became a liability to those in power. Once the Republicans controlled the federal government, his charges and investigations began hurting his own party, which no longer needed him as a partisan tool to overcome entrenched Democratic rule. When McCarthy began going after central institutions of state power, threatening an investigation of the CIA and holding hearings on allegations that the Army harbored communists, his downfall came quickly. Eisenhower, who had kept quiet about McCarthy, moved behind the scenes to undercut him, while public critics became emboldened. A March 1953 broadcast by Edward R. Murrow on the CBS television network, dissecting McCarthy’s methods, rebutting his charges, and blaming the country as a whole for allowing him to create an atmosphere of fear, reflected the changing political atmosphere and hastened the senator’s decline. A televised Senate hearing in 1954, considering charges that McCarthy had pressured the Army to give a member of his staff preferential treatment, further reduced his backing, to the point that in December of that year his colleagues voted by a large margin to censure him for behavior unbecoming of a member of the Senate.

  McCarthy’s downfall did not end McCarthyism, which remained institutionalized, inside and outside of the government. Loyalty oaths and investigations continued, the State Department restricted the ability of communists and other dis
senters to enter or leave the country, and Congress passed its most draconian anticommunist law yet in 1954, the Communist Control Act, which denied the Communist Party all legal rights. As the Communist Party shriveled, the FBI actually escalated its campaign against it with the 1956 creation of the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, an effort to weaken the party through the use of agents provocateurs, the spread of false information, leaks to the media, tax audits, and the like. (Later, the FBI would use COINTELPRO to target other movements it disliked, including the civil rights movement.) In Hollywood, the blacklist remained solidly in place through the end of the 1950s. In television, it lasted even longer.

  The hot war in Korea, and the Cold War before and after, narrowed political debate and cultural horizons for an entire generation. In 1952, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas wrote that someone who left the country for several months would return to “be shocked at the arrogance and intolerance of great segments of the American press, at the arrogance and intolerance of many leaders in public office, at the arrogance and intolerance reflected in many of our attitudes toward Asia. He will find that thought is being standardized, that the permissible area of calm discussion is being narrowed, that the range of ideas is being limited, that many minds are closed.” Even after the Korean War ended, few voices challenged the fundamental premises of American foreign policy, as the diversity of views about domestic and international politics never matched that in the immediate post–World War II years. With left-wing radicalism all but eliminated from American life, and conservative antistatism contained, a cultural and political consensus reigned, at least for a while.