| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Jonathan Bell. The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years. (Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2004. Pp. xix, 383. $37.50.
For decades scholars of modern American politics have tried to explain why the New Deal reform impulse waned during the 1940s. Much of the existing literature views American liberalism as a weak force by the end of World War II, its strength sapped by a powerful conservative coalition in Congress, the growing power of big business, and the return of prosperity. Alan Brinkley and Ellis Hawley, among others, have shown how liberal thinking evolved during the war in response to these changing circumstances. By 1945, most liberals had abandoned their ambitious plans to use state power to redistribute wealth in favor of more modest efforts to use fiscal and monetary policy to promote economic growth.	1
In his well-researched book, Jonathan Bell challenges this view, arguing that liberalism was alive and well at the end of World War II. He believes that "a powerful forum of social democratic ideas existed in the United States at the end of the war" (p. xiii) While liberal ideas survived the war, they could not contend with the conservative pressures of the Cold War. "By 1952, Cold War anti-statism had overwhelmed the social democratic promise of the early postwar years in the United States," he writes (p. xv).	. . .

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