VISIONS OF POSTWAR FREEDOM ★^883shaped postwar society. By 1946, more than 1 million veterans were attend-
ing college under its provisions, making up half of total college enrollment.
Almost 4 million would receive home mortgages, spurring the postwar subur-
ban housing boom.
During 1945, unions, civil rights organizations, and religious groups urged
Congress to enact the Full Employment Bill, which tried to do for the entire
economy what the GI Bill promised veterans. The measure established a “right
to employment” for all Americans and required the federal government to
increase its level of spending to create enough jobs in case the economy failed
to do so. The target of an intense business lobbying campaign, the bill only
passed in 1946 with the word “Full” removed from its title and after its commit-
ment to governmental job creation had been eliminated. But as the war drew to
a close, most Americans embraced the idea that the government must continue
to play a major role in maintaining employment and a high standard of living.
The Road to Serfdom
The failure of the Full Employment Bill confirmed the political stalemate
that had begun with the elections of 1938. It also revealed the renewed intel-
lectual respectability of fears that economic planning represented a threat
to liberty. When the New Republic spoke of full employment as the “road to
freedom,” it subtly acknowledged the impact of The Road to Serfdom (1944), a
surprise best-seller by Friedrich A. Hayek, a previously obscure Austrian-born
economist. Hayek claimed that even the best-intentioned government efforts
to direct the economy posed a threat to individual liberty. He offered a simple
message—“Planning leads to dictatorship.”
Coming at a time when the miracles of war production had reinvigorated
belief in the virtues of capitalism, and with the confrontation with Nazism
highlighting the danger of merging economic and political power, Hayek
offered a new intellectual justification for opponents of active government. In a
complex economy, he insisted, no single person or group of experts could possi-
bly possess enough knowledge to direct economic activity intelligently. A free
market, he wrote, mobilizes the fragmented and partial knowledge scattered
throughout society far more effectively than a planned economy.
Unlike many of his disciples, Hayek was not a doctrinaire advocate of
laissez-faire. His book endorsed measures that later conservatives would
denounce as forms of socialism—minimum wage and maximum hours laws,
antitrust enforcement, and a social safety net guaranteeing all citizens a basic
minimum of food, shelter, and clothing. Hayek, moreover, criticized traditional
conservatives for fondness for social hierarchy and authoritarian govern-
ment. “I am not a conservative,” he would later write. But by equating fascism,
What visions of America’s postwar role began to emerge during the war?