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The Crucial Decade: The 1940s and Beyond
Gary Gerstle
| For a long time historians of the twentieth-century United States have been drawn to the decade of the 1940s as a critical moment in the establishment of a modern liberal order. During those years, the labor movement and the welfare state matured, civil rights emerged as a national issue, the United States replaced its cranky isolationism with a robust internationalism, and the Democratic party secured its political ascendancy. These developments can be traced back to the 1930s, of course, but only in the 1940s did they transcend the crises of depression and total war from which they had emerged and become settled features of the American political landscape. As Eric F. Goldman argued in his classic book, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945–1955, only in the 1940s did liberals secure the dominance of their political program for the long term.1 |
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During the last fifteen years, scholars have modified this view without, however, abandoning the notion that the 1940s constituted a crucial decade. In their modified, or revisionist, view, the significance of the 1940s lies as much in what failed to occur as in what did occur. The labor movement grew in size and security but at the cost of purging radicals from union ranks and sacrificing dreams for workplace democracy and social democracy. The civil rights movement, meanwhile, lost its connection to anticapitalist currents both at home (in the labor movement) and abroad (in anticolonial movements). The liberalism that did emerge from the 1940s was tamer and less confrontational than many reformers and radicals of the 1940s had wanted it to be. The term "liberal consensus," coined by John Higham in the 1950s and popularized by Godfrey Hodgson in the 1970s, came to signify this shrunken liberalism.2 |
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The three articles I have been asked to comment on are all engaged with arguments about the centrality and the political nature of the 1940s; the first two, by Thomas A. Guglielmo and Anthony S. Chen, focus on civil rights issues and seek to extend the revisionist view of the 1940s outlined above. Major civil rights initiatives in Texas and New York State, these two historians argue, either failed to achieve their objectives or left behind legacies that would hamper subsequent civil rights work. The third article, by Laura McEnaney, shifts the focus from race to class as it explores a little-studied kind of proletarian struggle—that occurring between renters and landlords in postwar Chicago. McEnaney's perspective is closer in spirit to the original Goldman view (though partaking far more than Goldman's work did of a "history from the bottom up" approach), in that it emphasizes that social democratic politics survived the war and animated the protests of Chicagoan renters well into the 1950s. What all three articles share, beyond a conviction of the centrality of the 1940s, is a belief that local and regional history archives contain untapped riches that, if properly mined, can yield answers to important questions about American political history. Indeed, each essay constitutes a piece of hitherto hidden history, rendered visible by the innovative and determined research of skillful and creative scholars. |
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Thomas A. Guglielmo's provocative essay not only aims to bring Texas Mexican Americans into the 1940s civil rights saga but also to emphasize the transnational dimensions of this story—in this case, the Mexican government's efforts to promote the civil rights campaign of Mexicans in the United States.3 In bringing this transnational dimension to the fore, Guglielmo joins the ranks of a new group of scholars, including Thomas Borstelmann, Mary L. Dudziak, Penny M. Von Eschen, Brenda Gayle Plummer, Jonathan Rosenberg, and others, who insist that the causes and effects of the civil rights movement can be understood only within a global context.4 But Guglielmo has a different international story to tell, not only because he focuses on the civil rights movement among Mexican Americans rather than African Americans but also because the international influence of the Mexican government strengthened the conservative rather than the radical dimensions of a domestic civil rights movement. Most of the scholars cited above, by contrast, have usually interpreted internationalist influences as pushing U.S. civil rights initiatives to the left. |
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