America’s role in World War II forever changed the country and Americans’ perceptions of themselves from Depression-era isolationists to key players in world affairs. The war was the main event in a highly eventful decade. It acted as the catalyst for change on so many levels — economic, social, political, military — that viewed as a whole, the forties were years of profound upheaval. The shock waves from these explosive times are still being felt.
The five broadest trends of the decade with the greatest importance for history were that: (1) America became the dominant world power in the aftermath of the war; (2) Americans experienced large-scale postwar abundance that found its political reflection in strong anticommunist sentiments; (3) atomic weapons and the Cold War reinvented war, international relations, and America’s place in them, as well as Americans’ attitudes towards science and military strength; (4) racism, sexism, and antisemitism became all-pervasive during the forties, and the atmosphere of the times prevented large gains in equality; and (5) a huge, decade-long migration of African-Americans from South to North was a major factor in the later civil rights movement.
America, New World Power
The most obvious change was in America’s sudden reversal of attitude toward the rest of the world: Two decades of isolationism gave way to popular support for fighting a world war on two fronts. From this great conflict, to whose victory America had contributed mightily, the nation emerged the richest, most heavily armed, best equipped, best trained, and consequently most powerful nation on earth. America had endured shortages and deprivations during the war, and it had lost hundreds of thousands in battle, but these setbacks were nothing in comparison to the devastation wrought on European countries, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. With these countries in a terribly weakened state, America’s dominance was even more clear.
From this newly found power, America gained a new sense of superiority over other nations. This did not just include military superiority, though with the atomic bomb, military superiority was the key new element in America’s dominance on the world stage. America took the opportunity to lord its military and economic strength over other nations, offering aid to those countries it wished to support politically, and threatening others with whom it disagreed (such as the Soviet Union), with dire consequences. The billions of dollars funded by the Marshall Plan were only the beginning of the sort of leverage the powerful new United States was willing to wield to influence foreign countries. The Truman Doctrine, as Godfrey Hodgson writes, "contained the seeds of a habit of intervention" by the U.S. in the affairs of more than a hundred foreign countries over a period of forty years.
Anticommunism and Abundance
The superiority felt in the military-industrial arena carried over into the social sphere as well. Throughout the war, Americans believed that by pitching in together, they could accomplish victory, and they had. After the war, the gung-ho spirit of sacrifice for the greater good of the country evolved into a fiercely pro-American attitude. Stepped-up anti-communist campaigns were the most outward sign of this new stance.
Another sign of American superiority was in its new purchasing power. The nation’s industries quickly converted to peacetime production to supply pent-up demand. Millions of women who so recently were employed in war factories were now returning to full-time homemaking, having more babies than any generation of American women in history, and buying more consumer goods than ever before. A new emphasis on domestic life, the so-called nuclear family, emerged. This model, in which a mother stayed at home to raise children and tend exclusively to domestic affairs, while a father worked exclusively outside the home, became not just a popular trend but a pattern to which many young people felt pressured to conform. Material prosperity and personal conformity became equated with being pro-American. As Elaine Tyler May wrote, "Cold War ideology and the domestic revival [are] two sides of the same coin: postwar Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the future."
