Second World War and Americans' view of the world

US war poster (Courtesy Northwestern University Library [public domain])

This paragraph from John Lewis Gaddis' The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972) gives a good, brief statement of one thing that was distinctive about the Cold War in US history and culture:

Demands for immediate demobilization had continued to intensify throughout the first part of 1946. Top civilian and military officials tried to counteract this pressure by launching a public campaign for retention of the draft and universal military training. President Truman told the nation in April that it would be "a tragic breach of national duty and international faith" if the American people failed to accept the responsibilities of leadership which went with their position as the strongest country in the world. The Administration did manage to secure an extension of the Selective Service Act in June, but one year later Congress allowed the draft to expire completely. Meanwhile, a potent combination of religious, pacifist, educational, farm, and labor organizations kept the proposal for universal military training from ever receiving serious consideration. "It looks as if Congress is determined to disarm us," Elmer Davis wrote to Bernard Baruch, "whether anybody else disarms or not." Not until Americans had suffered the repeated shocks of the Czechoslovak coup, the Berlin blockade, the Soviet atomic bomb, the fall of China, and the Korean War would they bring themselves to accept a large peacetime military establishment as a normal state of affairs. (pp. 341-2; my emphasis)

That "large peacetime military establishment" was new. After both the Civil War and the First World War, the US military was substantially demobilized. You couldn't really say that the US at that point was in the 18th-century democratic ideal state of no standing army.

Soviet war poster from the Second World War: "Red Army soldier, SAVE US!"

But there was a qualitative difference in the situation after the Second World War. And the acceptance of that "as a normal state of affairs" was also new. The early postwar period was also the first time that the United States was clearly the most powerful single nation in the world. And that sense of dominance has a huge effect on American thinking about world affairs. A far from completely benign effect.


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