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Curricular framework: Post Reconstruction to 2010

Part V: Growing Pains

The Federal victory in 1865 restored the Union and in the process helped to accelerate America’s transformation into a modern nation-state. A distinctly national consciousness began to displace the sectional emphases of the antebellum era. During and after the Civil War, the Republican-led Congress pushed through legislation to foster industrial and commercial development and western expansion. In the process, the United States abandoned the Jeffersonian dream of a decentralized agrarian republic and began to forge a dynamic new industrial economy generated by an increasingly national market. After 1865 many Americans turned their attention to the unfinished business of settling a continent and completing an urban-industrial revolution begun before the war. Huge corporations based upon mass production and mass marketing began to dominate the economy. As the prominent sociologist William Graham Sumner remarked, the process of industrial development “controls us all because we are all in it. It creates the conditions of our own existence, sets the limits of our social activity, and regulates the bonds of our social relations.” The Industrial Revolution was not only an urban phenomenon; it transformed rural life as well. Those who got in the way of the new emphasis on large-scale, highly mechanized commercial agriculture and ranching were brusquely pushed aside. The friction between new market forces and traditional folkways generated political revolts and social unrest during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The clash between tradition and modernity peaked during the 1890s, one of the most strife-ridden decades in American history. A deep depression, agrarian unrest, and labor violence provoked fears of class warfare. This turbulent situation transformed the presidential election campaign of 1896 into a clash between rival visions of America’s future. The Republican candidate, William McKinley, campaigned on behalf of modern urban-industrial values. By contrast, William Jennings Bryan, the nominee of the Democratic and Populist parties, was an eloquent defender of America’s rural past. McKinley’s victory proved to be a watershed in political and social history. By 1900, the United States would emerge as one of the world’s greatest industrial powers, and it would therefore assume a new leadership role in world affairs.

Part VI: Modern America

The United States entered the twentieth century on a wave of unrelenting change. In 1800 the nation was a rural, agrarian society largely detached from the concerns of international affairs. By 1900 the United States had become a highly industrialized urban culture with a growing involvement in world politics and commerce. In other words, the nation was on the threshold of modernity. The prospect of modernity both excited and scared Americans. Old truths and beliefs clashed with unsettling scientific discoveries and social practices. People debated the legitimacy of Darwinism, the existence of God, the dangers of jazz, and the federal effort to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. The automobile and airplane helped shrink distances, and communications innovations such as radio and film contributed to a national consciousness. In the process, the United States began to emerge from its isolationist shell. Noninvolvement in foreign wars and nonintervention in the internal affairs of foreign governments formed the pillars of American foreign policy until the end of the century. During the 1890s, however, expanding commercial interests around the world led Americans to extend the horizons of their concerns. Imperialism was the order of the day among the great European powers, and a growing number of American expansionists demanded that the United States also adopt a global ambition and join in the hunt for new territories and markets. Such mixed motives helped spark the War of 1898 and helped justify the resulting acquisition of colonies outside the continental United States. Entangling alliances with European powers soon followed. The outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 posed an even greater challenge to the American tradition of isolation and nonintervention. The prospect of a German victory over the French and British threatened the European balance of power, which had long ensured the security of the United States. By 1917 it appeared that Germany might emerge triumphant and begin to menace the Western Hemisphere. Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to use American intervention in World War I to transform the world order in accordance with his idealistic principles severed U.S. foreign policy from its isolationist moorings. It also spawned a prolonged debate about the role of the United States in world affairs, a debate that World War II would resolve for a time on the side of internationalism. While the United States was entering the world stage as a formidable military power, it was also settling into its role as a great industrial power. Cities and factories sprouted across the landscape. An abundance of new jobs served as a magnet attracting millions of immigrants. They were not always welcomed, nor were they readily assimilated. Ethnic and racial strife, as well as labor agitation, increased after 1900. In the midst of such social turmoil and unparalleled economic development, reformers made their first sustained attempt to adapt their political and social institutions to the realities of the industrial age. The worst excesses and injustices of urban-industrial development–corporate monopolies, child labor, political corruption, hazardous working conditions, urban ghettos–were finally addressed in a comprehensive way. During the Progressive Era (1890-1917), local, state, and federal governments sought to rein in the excesses of industrial capitalism and develop a more efficient public policy. A conservative Republican resurgence challenged the notion of the new regulatory state during the 1920's. Free enterprise and corporate capitalism witnessed a dramatic revival. But the stock market crash of 1929 helped propel the United States and many other nations into the worst economic downturn in history. The unprecedented severity of the Great Depression renewed public demands for federal government programs to protect the general welfare. “This nation asks for action,” declared President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 1933 inaugural address. The many New Deal initiatives and agencies instituted by Roosevelt and his Democratic administration created the framework for a welfare state that has since served as the basis for American public policy. The New Deal helped revive public confidence and put people back to work, but it did not end the Great Depression. It took a world war to restore full employment. The necessity of mobilizing the nation in support of the Second World War also accelerated the growth of the federal government. And the incredible scope of the war helped catapult the United States into a leadership role in world politics. The creation and use of nuclear bombs ushered in a new era of atomic diplomacy that held the fate of the world in the balance. For all of the new creature comforts associated with modern life, Americans in 1945 found themselves living amid an array of new anxieties, not the least of which was a global “cold war” against communism.

Part VII: The American Age

The United States emerged from World War II the preeminent military and economic power in the world. While much of Europe and Asia struggled to recover from the physical devastation of the war, the United States was virtually unscathed, its economic infrastructure intact and operating at peak efficiency. By 1955 the United States, with only 6 percent of the world’s population, was producing half of the world’s goods. In Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, American products and popular culture attracted excited attention. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">Yet the specter of a “cold war” cast a pall over the buoyant revival of the economy. The tense ideological contest with the Soviet Union and Communist China produced numerous foreign crises and sparked a domestic witch hunt for Communists in the United States that far surpassed earlier episodes of political and social repression in the nation’s history. Both major political parties accepted the geopolitical assumptions embedded in the ideological cold war with international communism. Both Republican and Democratic presidents affirmed the need to “contain” the spread of Communist influence around the world. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">This bedrock assumption eventually embroiled the United States in a costly war in Southeast Asia which destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and revived isolationist sentiments. The Vietnam War was also the catalyst for a countercultural movement in which young idealists of the “baby boom” generation promoted many overdue social reforms, including the reforms that were the focus of the civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements. But the youth revolt also contributed to an array of social ills, from street riots to drug abuse to sexual promiscuity. The social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s provoked a conservative backlash as well. In their efforts to restore “law and order,” mayors failed to protect civil rights in their cities. Richard Nixon’s paranoid reaction to his critics led to the Watergate affair and the destruction of his presidency. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">Through all this turmoil, however, the basic premises of welfare state capitalism that Franklin Roosevelt had instituted with his New Deal programs remained essentially intact. With only a few exceptions, both Republicans and Democrats after 1945 came to accept the notion that the federal government must assume greater responsibility for the welfare of individuals than had heretofore been the case. Even Ronald Reagan, a sharp critic of liberal social-welfare programs, recognized the need for the federal government to provide a “safety net” for those who could not help themselves. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">This fragile consensus on public policy began to disintegrate in the late 1980s amid stunning international events and less visible domestic changes. The internal collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of European communism surprised observers and sent policy makers scurrying to respond to a post-cold war world in which the United States remained the only legitimate superpower. After forty-five years, American foreign policy was no longer centered on a single adversary, and world politics lost its bipolar quality. During the early 1990s the two Germanys reunited, apartheid in South Africa ended, and Israel and the Palestinians signed a treaty providing peace—for awhile. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">At the same time, American foreign policy began to focus less on military power and more on economic competition and technological development. In those arenas, Japan and a reunited Germany challenged the United States for preeminence. By reducing the public’s fear of nuclear annihilation, the end of the cold war also reduced American interest in foreign affairs. The presidential election of 1992 was the first since 1936 in which foreign-policy issues played virtually no role. This was an unfortunate development, for post-cold war world affairs remained volatile and dangerous. The implosion of Soviet communism after 1989 unleashed a series of ethnic, nationalist, and separatist conflicts throughout Eurasia. Responding to pleas for assistance, the United States found itself being drawn into crises in faraway locations such as Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">As the new multipolar world careened toward the end of a century and the start of a new millennium, fault lines began to appear in the American social and economic landscape. A gargantuan federal debt and rising annual deficits threatened to bankrupt a nation that was becoming top-heavy with retirees. Without fully realizing it, much less appreciating its cascading consequences, the American population was becoming disproportionately old. The number of people aged ninety-five to ninety-nine doubled between 1980 and 1990, and the number of centenarians increased 77 percent. The proportion of the population aged sixty-five and older rose steadily during the 1990s. By the year 2010, over half of the elderly population was over seventy-five. This demographic fact harbored profound social and political implications. It exerted increasing stress on health-care costs, nursing home facilities, and the very survival of the Social Security system. <span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);">At the same time that the gap between young and old was increasing, so, too, was the disparity between rich and poor. This trend threatened to stratify a society already experiencing rising levels of racial and ethnic tension. Between 1960 and 1990 the gap between the richest 20 percent of the population and the poorest 20 percent doubled. Over 20 percent of all American children in 1990 lived in poverty, and the infant-mortality rate rose. The infant-death rate in Japan was less than half that in the United States. Despite the much-ballyhooed “war-on-poverty” programs initiated by Lyndon Johnson and continued in one form or another by all of his successors, the chronically poor at the start of the twenty-first century were more numerous and more bereft of hope than in 1964.