American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  For the influence of the military and intelligence agencies, see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000).

  For the federal role in postwar research and development, see David Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, “Twentieth-Century Technological Change,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Walter A. MacDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985); D. Graham Burnett, “A Mind in the Water: The Dolphin as Our Beast of Burden,” Orion (May–June 2010): 38–51.

  For defense spending, see Michael Edelstein, “War and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, ed. Engerman and Gallman; 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).

  For postwar anticommunism, see Ellen Shrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Robert Griffith and Athan G. Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974); Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978); Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Donald F. Crosby, S.J., God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Herbert S. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); David Oshinksy, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983); Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004); Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right: The New American Right (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1964); Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991); David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

  For the language of anticommunism, see Eric Foner, The Story of Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998); Les Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930’s–1950’s,” American Historical Review 74 (April 1970): 1046–64; Jim Tuck, McCarthyism and New York’s Hearst Press: A Study in Roles in the Witch Hunt (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995).

  For government investigations of communism and homosexuality, see Eric Bentley, ed., Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968 (New York: Viking, 1971); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); 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); Richard Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962); John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

  For McCarthy and housing, see Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Neil J. Sullivan, The Dodgers Move West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  For anticommunism and labor, see Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Harvey A. Levenstein, Communism, Anti-Communism, and the CIO (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kiernan Walsh Taylor, eds., American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

  For the left-wing influence on mass culture and the blacklist, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996); Paul Buhle and David Wagner, Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s Guide to the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980).

  For religion and the Cold War, see Patrick Allitt, American Religion Since 1945: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Andrew J. Rotter, “Christians, Muslims, and Hindus: Religion and U.S.–South Asian Relations, 1947–1954,” Diplomatic History 24 (Fall 2000): 593–613; Thomas A. Kselman and Steven Avella, “Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States,” Catholic Historical Review 72 (July 1986): 403–24.

  For the 1952 election and Eisenhower, see Barton J. Bernstein, “Election of 1952,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–2001, vol. 8, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002); Gary W. Reichard, Politics as Unusual: The Age of Truman and Eisenhower (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1988); Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984); Robert Griffith, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth,” American Historical Review 87 (February 1982): 87–122; Arthur Larson, A Republican Looks at His Party (New York: Harper, 1956).

  For militarism, see Alex Roland, The Military-Industrial Complex (Washington, DC: Society for the History of Technology and the American Historical Association, 2001); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  For McCarthy’s downfall and the continuation of anticommunism, see A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986); Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow, 1992); Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994).

  Chapter 5: Suburban Nation

  For Florence Thompson, see Rebecca Markel, “Migrant Madonna,” Smithsonian 32 (March 2002): 21–22; Bill Ganzel, Dust Bowl Descent (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

  For general histories of postwar living, see James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977); David Halberstram, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993); John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941–1960 (New York: Norton, 1988).

  For suburban living as the image of the United States, see Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lynn Spiegel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  For precursors of postwar society, see Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917–1933 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).

  For postwar manufacturing, see David M. Gordon
, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  For federal infrastructure projects, see Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, revised and updated ed. (New York: Penguin, 1993); T. L. Hills, The St. Lawrence Seaway (London: Methuen, 1959); William R. Willoughby, The St. Lawrence Waterway: A Study in Politics and Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961); Arnold R. Hirsch, “New Orleans: Sunbelt in the Swamp,” in Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II, ed. Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941–1956 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979); Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997).

  For demography, life expectancy, and diet, see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Vital Statistics Reports 51 (December 19, 2002); Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Richard A. Easterlin, “Twentieth-Century American Population Growth,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Stephen Lassonde, “Family and Demography in Postwar America: A Hazard of New Fortunes?,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Cristophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

  On unions, social benefits, and the transformation of working-class life, see Joshua B. Freeman, “Labor During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Agnew and Rosenzweig; Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000); Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977); Robert H. Zieger, John L. Lewis: Labor Leader (Boston: Twayne, 1988); David L. Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jack Metzgar, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Seth Wigderson, “How the CIO Saved Social Security,” Labor History 44 (November 2003): 483–507; Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff, What Do Unions Do? (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

  For the anti-union offensive, see Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978); Thaddeus Russell, Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (New York: Knopf, 2001); Kim Phillips-Fein, “‘If Business and the Country Will Be Run Right’: The Business Challenge to the Liberal Consensus, 1945–1964,” International Labor and Working-Class History 72 (2007): 192–215; Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (New York: Verso, 1986).

  For consumer credit, see Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Roger Lowenstein, “Tax Break: Who Needs the Mortgage-Interest Deduction?,” New York Times Magazine, March 5, 2006; David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).

  For discount stores, see Sandra S. Vance and Roy V. Scott, “Sam Walton and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.: A Study in Modern Southern Entrepreneurship,” Journal of Southern History 58 (May 1992): 231–52; Susan Strasser, “Woolworth to Wal-Mart: Mass Merchandising and the Changing Culture of Consumption,” in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (New York: New Press, 2006).

  For media and advertising, see Susan J. Douglas, “Mass Media: From 1945 to Present,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Agnew and Rosenzweig.

  For suburbanization, see Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Richard Polenberg, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States Since 1938 (New York: Penguin, 1980); Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice, eds., Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Knopf, 2003); D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: Norton, 1996); The Lakewood Story: History, Tradition, Values (Lakewood, CA: City of Lakewood, 2004); Herbert J. Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Vintage, 1967); David Beers, Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace (New York: Doubleday, 1996); Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

  For residential segregation and resistance to integration, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker & Company, 2009); James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  For the decline in rural work, see Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620–the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980); Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York: Norton, 1998).

  For migration of people and jobs, see Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclass from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950); Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, “Mississippi Delta Planters and Debates over Mechanization, Labor, and Civil Rights in the 1940s,” Journal of Southern History 60 (May 1994): 263–84; James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Gail Cooper, Air-Conditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

  For immigration, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and revised ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Reed Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (Boston: Bedford, 1994); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (P
rinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  For shopping centers, see Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Thomas W. Hanchett, “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s,” American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1082–1110; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).

  For suburban religion, see Elaine Tyler May, “Cold War—Warm Hearth: Politics and the Family in Postwar America,” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); James T. Fisher, “American Religion Since 1945,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Agnew and Rosenzweig.

  For suburban energy use and environmental impact, see Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  For postwar sexuality and gender roles, see Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006); Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women’s Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1993); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992).

  For female labor force participation, see Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Nancy F. Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Paddy Quick, “Rosie the Riveter: Myths and Realities,” Radical America 9 (July–October 1975): 115–31.