Nelson Lichtenstein
Jonathan Bell has written a breakthrough book. Bell has done tremendous archival work to unravel the political meaning of state and local races across at least four election cycles: 1946, 1948, 1950, and 1952. Bell's enormous research and insightful feel for the politics of the first postwar decade give him the authority to recast for our time the essential insight that foreign policy-and in particular the liberal anti-communist internationalism that eventually came to dominate both parties-was a weapon used not only against external enemies but against that generation of social reformers who had sought to use the power of the modern state to organize the working class, ameliorate inequality, eliminate Jim Crow, and build a European-style welfare state. These were the stakes in 1948 and 1950, and they remain the stakes today, which is why Bell's book will have a wide audience and an enthusiastic reception. I cannot think of any book in the last decade that does more to explain the domestic side of the Cold War.
James T. Patterson
Jonathan Bell's, The Liberal State on Trial, argues that responses to the Cold War greatly advanced "anti-statism" in the United States during the Truman years, thereby reorienting and damaging the goals of American liberalism. His boldly presented, deeply researched book will appeal to scholars and others interested in the course of American politics during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
