Memories of the Movement

This chapter contrasts the 1963 March on Washington with its 1983 commemoration event held in the anti-statist Reagan era. In the former, a succession of civil rights activists decried the assumptions of the liberal consensus about the resolution of racial problems. By contrast, in the latter, African American leaders and their supporters called on government to reengage with the postwar commitment to expanding employment opportunities and improving living standards for all Americans.

Containment

Assessing the application of the liberal consensus idea to postwar foreign policy, this chapter contends that myths about the bipartisan spirit of U.S. foreign policy have too long found ready acceptance from historians. Politics did not stop at the water’s edge, even when bipartisanship was at its supposed zenith during World War II and the early Cold War. While there was unanimity during the post-war era that the growth of international communism was a threat to U.S. interests, this did not mean that foreign policy was free of political conflict, and partisan charges that the government of the day was losing the Cold War were commonplace. Meanwhile, non-elite opinion evinced little support for confrontation with the main Communist powers, reluctance to engage in another land war like Korea, and concern about survival in the nuclear era. The divisiveness wrought by Vietnam was supposed to have brought an end to the “Cold War consensus,” but uncertainty over its meaning was evident well before this.

Historians and the Postwar Liberal Consensus

This chapter explores how historians have employed the paradigm of the “liberal consensus” in their work about the postwar United States. It underlines the concept’s pervasiveness within the historiography, even if often employed quite differently by different historians. While recent studies of modern American conservatism in particular have challenged the existence of any consensus during this period, the chapter notes that there remains strong evidence to support the view that a consensus ideology existed among a political and intellectual elite.

Introduction

In outlining the goals of the volume as a whole, this introductory chapter sets out the concept of the liberal consensus as a paradigm to understand American politics and society during the postwar years. Most influentially defined by Godfrey Hodgson in his 1976 book America In Our Time, the term has been employed (if in contrasting ways) by many historians of the United States. In recent years, historians have increasingly questioned the extent to which consensus characterized America during this period. Taking on different themes, the essays in the volume seek to reconsider the paradigm’s utility.

Billy Graham’s Neo-evangelical Triumph and the Limits of the Liberal Consensus

This chapter demonstrates how Billy Graham and like-minded clerics did much to move conservative evangelicalism into the political and religious mainstream through their appropriation of core elements of the liberal consensus, notably anti-communism, patriotism, and consumerism. This enabled them to lay the conservative ecumenical groundwork for the rise of the Religious Right in the 1970s.

Sunbelt Patriarchs

This chapter studies the parallel rise of Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. In doing so, it reveals that the emergent and development-hungry Sunbelt of the Southwest and South stood outside the liberal consensus framed by the northeastern establishment. Indeed, the chapter signifies that the corporate elite of the so-called Steelbelt was less than unified in support of its core principles, as manifested by the efforts of some business leaders to employ inward investment and political contributions as a means to ensure that the Sunbelt remained an oasis of anti-New Dealism from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Social Welfare in the United States, 1945–1960

This chapter explores the differing visions of the American welfare state put forward by moderately liberal Democrats and moderately conservative Republicans from the late 1940s through the end of the 1950s. Truman and Stevenson Democrats looked to northern European models for inspiration in the postwar era, but modified their social democratic character to gain the acceptance of a nation with a political culture of individualism and anti-statism. Eisenhower-era Republicans thought in terms of insuring male “breadwinners” against major losses of income rather than a comprehensive, citizen-based model of social welfare entitlement. Even that more limited approach marked a major break with more strongly conservative visions of social provision via the private sector. This narrowing of differences between moderate liberals and moderate conservatives on social welfare policy sheds light on the extent to which the politics and public policy of this period can fairly be characterized as consensual. In policy terms this was embodied by the major reforms of Social Security undertaken by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in 1950 and 1954 respectively. Its limitations were conversely reflected in the failure to enact social welfare measures that did not conform to the New Deal tradition, particularly in the field of healthcare.

The 1930s Roots of the Postwar “Consensus”

This chapter argues that the postwar decades were characterized less by a fixedconsensus about American political values than by widespread agreement about the needfor such a consensus. It then suggests that the roots of this consensus culture can be found in the turbulent years that preceded U.S. entry into World War II. During this period, diverse American elites worried that fascism and communism constituted a threat to the United States not only abroad but also at home. They were also concerned about the effects of disunity on democratic political culture. As a consequence, these elites came to believe that Americans needed to emphasize their shared political values in order to avoid the social unrest that had ravaged other lands, but did not always agree on the nature of those shared values.

Gender in an Era of Liberal Consensus

For many historians of American women, the postwar era of “liberal consensus” maps neatly onto a vacuum in women’s activism from 1945 through to the early 1960s; attempts to foster activism on gender issues in this period were astutely described by one scholar as “survival in the doldrums.” In part the absence of feminist political engagement reflected the strong cultural focus on gender and domesticity and a consequent discomfort with the place of women in the public sphere. It also testified to the determination of women’s civic associations to replace a politics of grievance and victimhood associated with feminist identity with a model of political participation that stressed responsibility and participation. This chapter critically assesses the way in which mainstream women’s organizations explicitly rejected gender identification as the basis of political engagement in the postwar years. It also contends that they contributed to the liberal consensus in promoting a political role for women that was based on inclusion rather than exclusion.

The Keynesian Consensus and Its Limits

This chapter argues that a postNew Deal Keynesian consensus shaped U.S. economic policy from 1945 to 1965 based on an evolving rather than static concept of Keynesianism that eventually exceeded the limits of political agreement. With enactment of the Employment Act of 1946, postwar economic policy entered a period of bipartisan consensus over the use of what could be called “compensatory Keynesianism” to limit cyclical fluctuations in the economy.This entailed running compensatory budget deficits during periods of recession (1949, 1953–54, 1957–58) and combating inflation through tight budgets during periods of prosperity.As economic growth slowed, however, new debate arose over the use of fiscal policy to maximize expansion. This became tied into the Cold War debate over how the United States could keep ahead of the Soviet Union in the post–Sputnik era; though more limited than the “compensatory” consensus, pro-growth ideas had attained political ascendancy by 1960.