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Farewell to Prosperity
Wealth, Identity, and Conflict in Postwar America
By Lisle A. Rose University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2014 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7323-9
CHAPTER 1
Schism in the Soul
On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt abruptly passed from the national and global scenes he had dominated for a dozen years. He left behind a world still at war, a legion of stunned followers, and a blueprint for the future.
Over the previous five years, Washington had drafted and enlisted some sixteen million young people into the armed forces. Many were among those whom FDR had declared as recently as 1937 to be part of the one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. Some had endured the Dust Bowl, scratching whatever they could from a parched and barren earth before abandoning crowded, weather-beaten shacks and shanties to drive a thousand miles in overloaded jalopies along hostile highways to uncertain futures; others had come from countless city streets, Plainvilles and Middletowns where hard luck held sway and the specter of financial ruin hung over every family. Still others had toiled in virtual peonage in fields across the great agricultural swath of the country. Wherever they had come from, Pearl Harbor canceled all futures. A Marine Corps pilot summed up the response of this rising generation to whom so little had been given. "They go to war because it is impossible not to. Because a current is established in society, so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream."
More than four hundred thousand never returned from far-off battlefields, a minuscule number among the sixty million who perished elsewhere, but a great tragedy in a nation that had lived most of its existence free from foreign entanglements. The millions who lived to shuck their uniforms were forever changed. Two or four or five years of service had militarized them so thoroughly that their entire later lives were grounded in what they had experienced and endured as GIs and swabbies, leathernecks and flyboys. Hollywood and a flood of books created a myth of their experience that was often at odds with what they knew. The most iconic war film appeared not during the conflict but immediately after. Shortly before Christmas 1945, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released Hollywood's version of They Were Expendable, journalist William L. White's classic account of the fall of the Philippines in early 1942 and of the gallant efforts of one small naval unit to stem the tide. The hundred-odd officers and men of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3 repeatedly threw their six small, fragile craft at the Japanese juggernaut, falling back down the islands as necessary, never giving up, even as they lost one after another of their tiny warships and an ever-greater number of their buddies. "The drama and essence of the story," reviewer Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times, "are most movingly refined in those scenes which compose the pattern of bravery and pathos implicit in the tale." Director John Ford and scriptwriter Frank Wead "have a deep and true regard for men who stick to their business for no other purpose than to do their jobs. To hold on with dignity and courage, to improvise when resources fail and to face the inevitable without flinching—those are the things which they have shown us how men do. Mr. Ford has made another picture which ... is nostalgic, warm with sentiment and full of fight in every foot."
For the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who experienced it, combat would ever be too awful to remember in its reality. Whatever nostalgia and warm sentiment they might conjure up at veterans' gatherings in later years, the horror would always remain. Correspondent Ernie Pyle, who would not live to see war's end, caught the utter moral exhaustion of combat better than any participant except Bill Mauldin: the "devastating sense of fear and depression" that lifted only when battle was imminent; the "pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all," whether it be Tarawa, Normandy, or Iwo Jima; the sense of "lost perspective" in battle, "like dreaming the same nightmare over and over again." Fighting in French and German towns, the soldiers seemed "terribly pathetic to me. They weren't warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain." Pyle tried to tell his comfortable readers at home about the realities of war. "Thousands of our men will be returning to you after Europe. They have been gone a long time and they have seen and done and felt things you cannot know."
Roosevelt thought he understood what the war and its preceding hard times had cost the American people. Fifteen months before his death, with the end of conflict in distant sight, he set before Congress his vision of the postwar world. "Sacrifices that we and our Allies are making," he told the lawmakers, "impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival.... The one supreme objective for the future ... can be summed up in one word: Security. And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security—in a family of nations." The country could not "return to the so-called 'normalcy' of the 1920's," FDR insisted, when, for the last time, America had embraced with fervor a business culture. To do so would mean that "even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home."
Having practically labeled the American capitalist system that was winning the war fascistic, Roosevelt proceeded to remind his countrymen that "the Federal Government already has the basic power to draft capital and property of all kinds for war purposes on a basis of just compensation." Should economic depression return to the postwar world, Washington might well be induced to assume overall command once more. "It is our duty now," Roosevelt continued, "to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known." That standard could not be assumed to have been met "if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and insecure." The American nation had begun and had grown "to its present strength" under the protection of those inalienable political rights granted in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. But even they had been inadequate to stem the tide of fundamental inequities that had arisen during the reign of unbridled, unregulated industrial capitalism. "We have come to a clear realization '," Roosevelt stated, "of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence." Hungry, unemployed people, he added, were dictatorship's fodder.
It was thus necessary to develop a "Second Bill of Rights" grounded in economic rather than political requirements in order to ensure "a new basis of security and prosperity for all." Each and every American should be guaranteed the right to a "useful and remunerative job" in the nation's offices, factories, shops, or farms and the right to a decent wage, "to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation." Every farmer should have the right to sell his produce at a rate that "will give him and his family a decent living." Every businessman should trade in an open market free from monopolistic threats and unfair competition. Each family must have a decent home and ready access to medical care so as to achieve and enjoy good health. Finally, every citizen should have the right of access to a good education and be free of economic fears of "old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment." All of these rights, Roosevelt concluded, "spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being." The several million fighting men abroad, the many millions more who backed them up in and out of uniform, and the families left behind had the right to demand no less for their sacrifice. The president thus challenged, as he had consistently since 1933, a Protestant ethic whose roots reached back to the earliest days of settlement and have defined and shaped the country ever since.
The Protestant Ethic
By the opening of the seventeenth century, the flood of specie from the gold and silver mines of the New World had stimulated an unprecedented growth of commerce throughout western Europe, especially within the trading nations along the Atlantic Seaboard and in Great Britain. This new age of rapid economic expansion and intellectual and physical exploration demanded a fresh temperament and a new set of rules that would maintain some measure of social stability in a time of incessant and dramatic transformation. Too many novel situations occurred too quickly for the rigid and restrictive codes of conduct of the fading medieval world to accommodate, much less anticipate or resolve. Western man—particularly those children of Britannia who carved new societies across the Atlantic and gradually became "Americans"—responded to the challenge with "a new psychological mechanism," one grounded in the temper of Renaissance Florence and the other flourishing commercial towns of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy in whose crowded, noisy streets where business and trade reigned supreme people had been "forced to know all the inward resources of their own nature, the momentary as well as the permanent." Life was now enjoyed rather than endured, its foundation defined "by the desire to obtain the greatest satisfaction from a period of power and influence that might be very brief." In the England of Elizabeth, "The new conditions favoured a pragmatic outlook and the ideal of self development through action.... [T]he desire was gradually forming to master Nature not obey her." That sense of impermanence bred a spirit of bold enterprise, of impatience, of a determination to grasp golden rings whenever they appeared, that bit deep into the psyche of Western man, carrying down the centuries to the physical and financial frontiers of the American West and of Wall Street.
Responding to this suddenly opening world of endless frontiers, Europe's new merchant classes—and the millions of emigrants to new worlds who eventually followed—began elaborating a social "gyroscope set by parents and other authorities ... learned in the privacy of the home from a small number of guides" that kept the individual "on course" throughout life, providing him a sure and firm "inner-direction." Associates, colleagues, and neighbors possessed similar social gyroscopes, "spinning at the same speed and set in the same direction," allowing, indeed encouraging, the formation of communities of likeminded folk. The inner-directed individual thrived on frontiers and in imperial holdings where his self-possession translated almost effortlessly into an unbreakable sense of authority, superiority, and entitlement. Those whose gyroscope did get off course for whatever reason "often suffered guilt and shame."
The force that set this gyroscope spinning for ambitious Europeans on the make was capitalism, at once sanctioned and deeply informed by the core values of the dynamic new religious impulse known as Protestantism, whose Bible replaced the Roman Catholic Church as God's instrument of instruction and redemption. Each man rose or fell in the world—and in God's estimation—on the basis of his own endeavors. He and he alone was responsible for whatever happened to him on earth as it would be in heaven—or in hell. Harnessed to and then reflected in countless individual psychological gyroscopes, the mighty force of Protestant capitalism drove nearly every economic endeavor around the North Atlantic rim and across the North American continent, creating global empires, political and moral revolutions, and new nations in its wake. The need to underwrite exploration and the development of overseas "plantations" and "factories" transformed and expanded mere money lending between individuals into complex cooperative investments or monetary "adventures." The joint stock companies that arose in Protestant England and the Netherlands in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries rescued usury from disgrace and gave it a dramatic new twist.
The heart of Puritan theology lay in the notion of a materialistic calling. "'God,' wrote a seventeenth century divine, 'doth call every man and woman ... to serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good.... The Great Governour of the world hath appointed to every man his proper post and province, and let him be forever so active out of his own sphere, he will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard and mind his own business.'"
Living fully in the world under these strictures, the pious man could only conclude that "the conscientious discharge of the duties of business is among the loftiest of religious and moral duties." As one divine preached, "'The begging friars and such monks as live only to themselves and their formal devotion, but do employ themselves in no other thing to further their own subsistence or the good of mankind ... yet have the confidence to boast of this, their course, as a state of perfection; which in very deed, as to the worthiness of it, falls short of the poorest cobbler, for his is a calling of God, and theirs is none.'" The good Christian must narrow his spiritual life to his own soul in order to deepen it. He "is blind in no man's cause, but best sighted in his own," another divine preached. "He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers in needless fires. He sees the falseness" of the world "and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment." "Idle leisure" became a cardinal sin. "Those that are prodigal of their time despise their own souls." Simple contemplation in monastery or home became a form of self-indulgence. "God hath commanded you in some way or other to labour for your daily bread."
The rational universe that modern science began to uncover was "the work of God, and its plan requires that the individual should labor for God's glory. There is a spiritual calling and a temporal calling. It is the first duty of the Christian to know and believe in God; it is by faith that he may be saved. But faith is not a mere profession ... the only genuine faith is the faith which produces works. 'At the day of Doom men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said of them, Did you believe? but, Were you doers or talkers only?'" After seeking the unconditional love of God, "The second duty of the Christian is to labor in the practical affairs of life." Tempered by self-examination, self-discipline, self-control, modern man was "the practical ascetic, whose victories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the counting house, and in the market."
Their course set before them, the inner-directed dynamos of the modern age set out to win a world. That part of the North American continent that would become the United States of America proved particularly fertile ground, for the land was vast, the people relatively few, the opportunities always greater than there were individuals to exploit them. It proved both a humbling and an exalting task. No one caught its essence better than novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. As young Nick Carraway sits on the beach of his soon-to-be-vacated Long Island home, looking across the water to the mansion of murdered bootlegger and confidence man Jay Gatsby, brilliant moonlight dissolves the 1922 scene "until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes——a fresh, green breast of the new world.... for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this Continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." However they might quail before the task, Britain's colonists knew that there was work to be done on this, their first, frontier: the Protestant ethic told them so.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Farewell to Prosperity by Lisle A. Rose. Copyright © 2014 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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