A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 519

A History of American Literature, Second Edition. Richard Gray.

© 2012 Richard Gray. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Toward a Transnational Nation

Americans ended the decade of the 1930s in an inward-looking mood, concerned

with economic issues, unemployment, and the need to heal internal ideological

divisions. By the close of World War II, however, that mood had changed. The United

States had become a global superpower, committed to the international arena. In the

new era of postwar, postcolonial politics, it had come to stand for the “American”

way of capitalism, individualism, and the open market, opposed in every respect to

the “Russian” or “communist” way of collectivism and the organized economy.

A war machine that had managed to treble munitions production in 1941 continued,

if in a slightly lower gear. The cessation of conflict did not mean an end to arms

production, now that the United States discovered a new threat in international

socialism, and the next decade or so saw the rapid expansion of what one president

was to term the military–industrial complex: a compact between military interests,

eager to acquire ever newer and more powerful armaments, and industrial interests,

just as eager to produce them, that was to prove satisfactory and profitable to both.

At the same time, the manufacturing industries catering to more peaceful demands

began to expand rapidly. Construction boomed; the demand for the consumer

durables of modern mass society – cars, televisions sets, refrigerators – grew among

people suddenly released from the constraints of war; and unemployment only rose

a little above the all-time low of 1.2 percent created by a war economy. The only

nation to emerge from World War II with its manufacturing plant intact and its

economy strengthened, America presented itself to the rest of the world – and, in

particular, to Europe – as an economic miracle. In 1949 the per capita income of the

United States was twice that of Britain, three times that of France, five times that of

Germany, and seven times that of Russia. It had only 6 percent of the world’s

5

Negotiating the American

Century

American Literature since 1945

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