Preface

My approach to the study of modern America grows out of my experience growing up in suburban Philadelphia in the late 1970s. As an undergraduate at Widener University (class of 1978), I was introduced to many of the classics in modern American history, and I was often struck by how many of these books, and the authors who wrote them, used the 1930s and the New Deal as their reference point. They emphasized the success of major reform movements and the achievements of progressive presidents to chart the steady triumph of liberal values in America. In many of these accounts, the expanding power of the federal government represented the clearest evidence of the triumph of liberal values.

But these books made little sense of the political events that I was witnessing all around me. My racially divided local community revolted against large-scale busing initiatives. My neighbors, mainly working-class Irish and Italians who had once worshiped Roosevelt, now voted Republican. By the time I entered graduate school at Brown University in 1980, the conservative movement was at high tide: Jerry Falwell was a national celebrity, Ronald Reagan was president, tax revolts were spreading like wildfire across the country, and  the once powerful New Deal coalition was in full retreat. But of course, the story was not that simple. The decade also witnessed the emergence of a number of important empowerment movements, which fed off the momentum created by the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. Women were demanding the Equal Rights Amendment, post-Stonewall gays were fighting against discrimination, and other racial minorities—especially Asians and Hispanics, whose numbers had swelled because of massive immigration—were raising their voices in protest. Nothing I was reading was making sense of this polarized, confused, and contentious national environment.

It was around that time that I came across an observation by the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson, who said that “Americans love change, but they hate to be changed.” We change our clothing style, our homes, and our hairstyles more than any other people on earth, but we resist altering our attitudes about the way we view the world. He was simply recasting a question that Robert Kennedy had asked in the months before his death in 1968: “How do we seek to change a society that yields so painfully to change?” That question captured for me the central contradiction of postwar politics and society: Americans had come to expect government to solve most major social problems, but they retained a traditional fear of federal power. Americans, as two political scientists noted in the 1950s, are philosophically conservative and operationally liberal. In the abstract, Americans believe in equal rights and oppose discrimination of any kind, but they cling tenaciously to deeply held values about limited government, self-help, and racial and gender stereotypes. Especially in the years since the 1960s, the tension between rising expectations of government and deep-seated fear of federal power has shaped public debate in America. Hence the title of this book: The American Paradox.

It is important that a book of this nature expose students to the many different subfields that make up the study of history—social, cultural, political, and intellectual. While all fields are represented here, the emphasis is on culture and politics. Students today have no connection to the old and tired debates between social and political historians. They are forging a new paradigm that views history through the prism of culture. Social surveys also reveal that this generation of students is the most politically engaged in recent memory. The results of the most recent presidential elections, which have shown a dramatic increase in voter turn-out among young people, prove that students today care about politics. For that reason, politics and culture will serve as the building blocks for the narrative and help distinguish the book from others in the market. At its core, this book recognizes the need for synthesis in historical writing, and for weaving together the threads of individual experiences into the broader fabric of American history.

This book also includes a number of stylistic and pedagogical devices that are designed to make it both practical and readable. I have integrated into the narrative important primary documents that are designed to provoke debate and discussion. Especially in upper-division courses, students need to develop the skill to analyze and interpret evidence. Students have under one cover some of the key documents in modern America: from George Kennan’s famous Mr. X article, to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1956), to Phyllis Schlafly’s attack on the Equal Rights Amendment. Ample graphs, charts, and photographs provide visual support for some of the important points raised in the text.

In an effort to animate the narrative, I included lots of colorful quotations, personality sketches, and anecdotes. I also chose to omit the names of people who appear only once in the narrative. As a result, there are references to “a congressman said” or “a journalist noted.” The important players and figures, however, are all properly identified. In addition, although the narrative makes reference to key historical debates, specific references to historians are usually confined to the selected bibliography at the end of each chapter. The bibliography contains both standard works and, when appropriate, the most recent books on major issues raised in the chapter.