Post War America 1945-1971. Howard Boone's Zinn
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and, if they refused to remain silent, put in jail. On the eve of war, in 1940, Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed, the Alien Registration Act, known as the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence in speech or writing, or to “affiliate” with organizations urging such action. It was therefore made a crime to advocate what Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had advocated in the Declaration of Independence. In the midst of the war to end repression, the American government prosecuted and sent to prison a number of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) for violating the Smith Act by what they wrote and said. What the government was anxious about was not the imminence of revolution—the Socialist Workers Party was tiny and weak—but the fact that the party criticized the war, questioning its objectives and arguing that its real intent was to preserve capitalism at home and imperialism abroad.
The government not only punished speechmakers and writers during World War II, it put in detention camps (some called them concentration camps) tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, including those born in this country—not for doing anything, but simply for being of Japanese descent. The argument was that they were potential threats to the war effort. Both the Smith Act prosecutions and the removal of the Japanese families from their homes into camps were ultimately approved by the Supreme Court. In World War II, as in previous wars, civil liberties were put aside at a time when freedom of discussion about life-and-death issues was most urgently needed.
The reconsideration of World War II in this chapter does not mean to ignore the fact that the war destroyed one of the most cruel governments in history—that of the Nazis’, as well as the aggressive imperialisms of Italy and Japan. It does not mean to deny that the war had tumultuous effects on many parts of the world, leading to the overthrow of old, oppressive regimes and to the development of revolutionary movements for independence and change. Nor does this reassessment mean to deny that the war created an atmosphere of hope that may have been an instrumental factor in the struggles for freedom that have taken place in many parts of the postwar world, including the United States. The intention here has been to show that these undoubted results must be weighed against other facts: that while the war enlisted the energies and sacrifices of tens of millions of ordinary people, it was directed by power elites in a few major nations. The chief concern of these elites was the expansion of their own power, the perpetuation of their own systems at home, and the extension of their domination over other parts of the world—facts as true of the United States as of the Soviet Union.
The intention has also been to show that the war not only left intact the existing systems, not only concentrated world power even more tightly than before, but that it perpetuated the identical values the victors claimed to be fighting against. The stockpiling of weapons continued; so, too, did the system of military alliances. Indiscriminate war on civilian populations as an instrument of international politics did not cease, nor did governmental control of information, the political use of racial hatred, the monopolization of wealth by a few, and the destruction of civil liberties—facts as true of the “totalitarian” Soviet Union as of the “democratic” United States.
There is no point, now, in answering the question: Should Americans therefore have fought the Nazis? Historians need to be concerned more with the future than with the past, and no crisis appears in exactly the same form twice. But there are phenomena that, if not exactly alike, have the same general characteristics at different times and places in history, and to know this may help us make the specific decisions that any particular situation requires. One of the characteristics of war is that it always represents a multiplicity of interests within each fighting nation. Also, the dominant values in American society may be so close to those the United States claims the enemy represents as to call into question how much human sacrifice can be justified for the traditional objective of military victory. As Yossarian said in Catch-22, when it was suggested that his anti-military talk was “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”: “The enemy is whoever wants to get you killed, whichever side he’s on.” And in a play by Bertolt Brecht, there is a frightening line of dialogue for all people called to war: “Let’s go fishing, said the angler to the worm.”
The problems America sees now in the postwar period are not dramatic deviations from that time of idealism and victory that was World War II; they were visible in wartime America, if anyone had cared enough to look. In World War II, despite the rhetoric of a crusade, the United States retained its basic historical characteristics: its arrangements of power and privilege, its traditional ideas and values. After the war, these characteristics emerged so sharply as to bring, in the 1960s, a national crisis, with tumultuous conflict, agonizing disillusionment, and a movement for change beyond anything the nation had ever seen.
When President Roosevelt returned to the United States from his meeting with Marshal Joseph Stalin and Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Yalta in early 1945, the end of the war now in sight, he said that the Big Three Conference
… ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that had been tried for centuries—and had always failed.
It sounded good—as had Wilson’s phrases of the same sort twenty-five years earlier. But his words represent an exact measure of how the postwar world failed to curb the same modes of international behavior of which both liberal and illiberal nations had been guilty for centuries. The foreign policy of the United States after the great war is almost a precise reproduction of what Roosevelt spoke of ending: unilateral action (in Lebanon, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), exclusive alliances (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the Central Treaty Organization, the Rio Pact), spheres of influence (Latin America, the Middle East, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan), balances of power (war in Korea, conflict over Berlin, the Cuban missile crisis).
The idea of intervention abroad became more acceptable during World War II, primarily because it seemed so clearly justified by Hitler’s invasions in Europe and Japan’s in Asia. After the war, it became easier to broaden the concept of interventions, responding not necessarily to invasions but to internal revolutions. Counter-revolutionary intervention was not something new. Since the turn of the century, the United States had sent armed forces into various countries in the Caribbean area (Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua) to prevent political changes or the inception of economic policies opposed by the American government or American business interests. After World War II, however, the methods of intervention and the justifications for intervention became far more sophisticated. Arms were now shipped, military and police advisers were sent in as coaches, counter-revolutionaries were trained, undercover operations were conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency—all of which left overt armed intervention by United States forces a policy of last resort. The justifications for intervention were firmly supported by a whole bag of symbols related to communism: “the Red menace,” “the Soviet threat,” “the Chinese hordes,” “the world communist conspiracy,” “we ‘lost’ China,” “the danger of internal subversion,” “better dead than Red,” and more. The postwar interventions were especially palatable because, while supported by conservative Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon, most of them were carried out by the liberal Democratic administrations of Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and could therefore be effortlessly fitted into the liberal tradition.
It has taken a long time for a critical view of this policy of intervention to become widespread in America, perhaps because what is wrong with modern liberal society resembles Yossarian’s jaundice:
Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. If it became jaundice, they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away, they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
If evil were unmitigated and consistent, Americans might recognize it easily and unite to get rid of it. But the