American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  For the GI Bill, see Michael J. Bennet, When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1996); Suzanne Mettle, Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship Under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” Journal of American History 90 (December 2003): 935–57.

  For voting rights, citizenship, and changing meanings of freedom, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and revised ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998).

  For congressional representation and rules, see James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002).

  For trials and juries, see Michael J. Klarman, “Is the Supreme Court Sometimes Irrelevant? Race and the Southern Criminal Justice System in the 1940s,” Journal of American History 89 (June 2002): 119–53; Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Verna Hildebrand, “A Historical Note on Jury Service for Women,” Humanist 40 (July–August 1980): 38–39; Joanna Grossman, “Women’s Jury Service: Right of Citizenship or Privilege of Difference?,” Stanford Law Review 46 (May 1994): 1115–60; M. Catherine Miller, “Finding ‘the More Satisfactory Type of Jurymen’: Class and the Construction of Federal Juries, 1926–1954,” Journal of American History 88 (December 2001): 979–1005.

  For postwar strikes, see George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step: Twenty Years of the CIO (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972); Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Irving Richter, Labor’s Struggles, 1945–1950: A Participant’s View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); Stan Weir, “American Labor on the Defensive: A 1940’s Odyssey,” Radical America 9 (July–August 1975): 163–85; Mark McColloch, “Consolidating Industrial Citizenship: The USWA at War and Peace, 1939–1946,” in Forging a Union of Steel: Philip Murray, SWOC, and the United Steelworkers, ed. Paul F. Clark, Peter Gottlieb, and Donald Kennedy (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1987); Jack Metzgar, “The 1945–1946 Strike Wave,” in The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, ed. Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009).

  For postwar working-class living standards, see CIO Wage Research Committee, “American Living Standards Endangered,” October 23, 1945; Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994); Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Robert Bruno, Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

  For blue-collar and female employment, see Claudia Goldin, “Labor Markets in the Twentieth Century,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, ed. Engerman and Gallman; Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston: Tawyne, 1995).

  For union political influence, see John Barnard, American Vanguard: The United Auto Workers During the Reuther Years, 1935–1970 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004); Dudley W. Buffa, Union Power and American Democracy: The UAW and the Democratic Party, 1935–72 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); Milton Derber, Labor in Illinois: The Affluent Years, 1945–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

  For business anti-unionism, see Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

  For price controls and consumer activism, see Meg Jacobs, “‘How About Some Meat?’: The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941–1946,” Journal of American History 84 (December 1997): 910–41; Anne Stein, “Post-War Consumer Boycotts,” Radical America 9 (July–August 1975): 156–61; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Working Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

  For the pattern of postwar collective bargaining, see David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Daniel Bell, “Labor’s Coming of Middle Age,” Fortune 44 (October 1951): 114–15, 137–50.

  For Taft-Hartley and its effects, see Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); James A. Gross, Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy, 1947–1994 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Nelson Lichtenstein, “‘The Man in the Middle’: A Social History of Automobile Industry Foremen,” in On the Line: Essays on the History of Autowork, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Stephen Meyer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).

  For southern union organizing efforts, see Barbara S. Griffith, The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Michael K. Honey, “Operation Dixie, the Red Scare, and the Defeat of Southern Labor Organizing,” in American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, ed. Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Numan V. Bartley, The New South, 1945–1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For?: The TWUA in the South, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

  Chapter 2: Cold War

  For broad frameworks for understanding the relationship between the United States and the world, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1959); Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996); Roger Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of the Postwar International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

  For the U.S. economic position in the world, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Henry C. Dethloff, The United States and the Global Economy Since 1945 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997).

  For the postwar military and demobiliz
ation, see R. Alton Lee, “The Army ‘Mutiny’ of 1946,” Journal of American History 53 (December 1966): 555–71; Lori Lyn Bogle, The Pentagon’s Battle for the American Mind: The Early Cold War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

  For Luce and the “American Century,” see Henry R. Luce, The American Century (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941); Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  For perceptions of insecurity, see John Lewis Gaddis, “The Insecurities of Victory: The United States and Perception of the Soviet Threat After World War II,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

  For globalism and its conservative critics, see Ernest Jackh, The War for Man’s Soul (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943); Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  For the foreign policy establishment, see Godfrey Hodgson, The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867–1950 (New York: Knopf, 1990); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1967); Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969).

  For efforts by mass organizations to influence foreign policy, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); CIO Political Action Committee, The People’s Program for 1946 (New York: CIO-PAC, 1946); Victor Silverman, Imagining Internationalism in American and British Labor, 1939–1949 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

  For the United Nations and international economic institutions, see Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003); Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001); Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy After World War II,” International Organization 31 (September 1977): 607–33; Mark Levinson, “Trade Places: Globalization from the Bottom Up,” New Labor Forum 11 (Fall–Winter 2002): 20–28.

  For U.S.-Soviet relations, see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–2002, updated 9th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004); Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 8th revised ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, and C. Earl Edmondson, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Melvyn P. Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do ‘We Now Know’?” American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 501–24.

  For oil and Middle East policy, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Bruce R. Kunihom, “U.S. Policy in the Near East: The Triumphs and Tribulations of the Truman Administration,” in Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey.

  For the origins of the Truman Doctrine and the Greek civil war, see Charles S. Maier, “Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy Objectives in the Truman Years,” in Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey; Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Carolyn Eisenberg, “The Cold War in Europe,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982): Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962).

  For the creation of the national security apparatus, see Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  Chapter 3: Stalemate in Washington

  For divisions in liberal groups, see J. Angus Johnston, “Questions of Communism and Anticommunism in Twentieth-Century American Student Activism,” Peace & Change 26 (July 2001): 301–15; Ronald Schatz, “Philip Murray and the Subordination of Industrial Unions to the United States Government,” in Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Philip Taft, The A.F. of L. from the Death of Gompers to the Merger (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959).

  For civil rights and the 1948 election, see Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement: The Changing Political Economy of Southern Racism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Michael R. Gardner, Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002); Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991); Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956); Jennifer A. Delton, Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Knopf, 2002).

  For the campaign and its outcome, see James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Harold I. Gullan, The Upset That Wasn’t: Harry S. Truman and the Crucial Election of 1948 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998); David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

  For Fair Deal legislation, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Colin Gordon, Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Robert Griffith, “Forging America’s Postwar Order: Domestic Politics and Political Economy in the Age of Truman,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform During the Truman Administration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966).

  Chapter 4: National Security State

  For the Korean War, see Steven Hugh Lee, The Korean War (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001); William W. Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Rudy Tomedi, No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993); Donald Knox, The Korean War: Pusan to Chosin; An Oral History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985); Donald Knox, with additional text by Alfr
ed Coppel, The Korean War: Uncertain Victory; An Oral History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988); Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950–1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Ron Robin, “Behavioral Codes and Truce Talks: Images of the Enemy and Expert Knowledge in the Korean Armistice Negotiations,” Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 625–46.

  For decolonization and the beginning of the Cold War in Asia, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996); James I. Matray, “The United States and East Asia in the Postwar Era,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002); Robert J. McMahon, “Toward a Post-Colonial Order: Truman Administration Policies Toward South and Southeast Asia,” in The Truman Presidency, ed. Michael J. Lacey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  For the militarization of American foreign policy, see Robert A. Pollard, “The National Security State Reconsidered: Truman and Economic Containment, 1945–1950,” and John W. Dower, “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia,” in Truman Presidency, ed. Lacey; Ernest R. May, American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1993); John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton/New Press, 1999).

  For atomic weapons and research, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988); Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005); Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994); Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998); Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1999).