Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968 - Hardcover

Stebenne, David

 
9781982102708: Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982102705 ISBN 13: 9781982102708
Verlag: Scribner, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A timely work of groundbreaking history explains how the American middle class ballooned at mid-century until it dominated the nation, showing who benefited and what brought the expansion to an end.

In Promised Land, David Stebenne examines the extraordinary revival of the middle class in mid-twentieth century America and how it drastically changed the country. The story begins with the pervasive income and wealth inequality of the pre-New Deal period. What followed—Roosevelt’s reforms, the regulation of business and finance, higher taxation of the truly affluent, and greater government spending—began a great leveling. World War II brought the military draft and the GI Bill, similarly transformative elements that also helped expand the middle class. For decades, economic policies and cultural practices strengthened the trend, and by the 1960s the middle class dictated American tastes from books to TV shows to housing to food, creating a powerful political constituency with shared interests and ideals.

The disruptive events of 1968, however, signaled the end of this headlong expansion. The cultural clashes and political protests of that era turned a spotlight on how the policies and practices of the middle-class era had privileged white men over women, people of color, and other marginalized groups, as well as economic growth over environmental protection. These conflicts, along with shifts in policy and economic stagnation, started shrinking that vast middle class and challenging its values, trends that continue to the present day. Now, as the so-called “end of the middle class” dominates the news cycle and politicians talk endlessly about how to revive it, Stebenne’s vivid history of a social revolution that produced a new and influential way of life reveals the fascinating story of how it was achieved and the considerable costs incurred along the way. In the form of a revealing history, Promised Land shines more than a little light on our possible future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Stebenne, the author of Promised Land, is a specialist in modern American political and legal history. He has published political commentary in The Conversation, HuffPost, The New Republic, The Observer, and Salon and has appeared on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered to discuss politics, the economy, and labor issues. A native of Rhode Island and Maryland, he teaches history and law at Ohio State University.  

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Chapter 1: A Dream Deferred CHAPTER 1 A Dream Deferred
In March 1929, fifty-four-year-old Herbert Hoover became president, having campaigned on the promise of a future in which most Americans would be truly middle class. Despite increasing economic inequality, some indications of economic progress gave Hoover confidence. “We in America today,” he told his supporters on August 11, 1928, “are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” In his stump speeches, Hoover had spelled out his expectations. He talked about home ownership for city and town dwellers, and farm ownership for the almost half of the population still living in rural areas. He envisioned a kind of middle-class standard, with two cars per household, and even more schooling as the norm. Hoover’s vision—breathtaking for a country in which so many people were poor or almost so—also encompassed a more stable kind of life for an expanded middle-class majority, in which employment was steady and savings assured, and ever more people were protected by privately provided insurance against death, accidents, and other major income disruptions and able to sustain themselves in old age. Twenty years later, as he looked back on his most important goals for Americans in 1929, Hoover wrote simply, “We want[ed] them all secure.”1

Hoover promised—and tried to deliver—that dream, but things went terribly wrong for his presidency, the United States, and for the world after 1929 when the stock market crashed. While much of that dream would eventually come true, it wouldn’t be for another quarter of a century, during which time the country would endure an economic depression and a major military conflict. The great big middle class was forged largely in the crucible of those two calamities.

Many and probably most people believe the cataclysmic stock market crash of October 29, 1929, was the primary cause of the Great Depression, but large-scale economic disasters rarely stem from one single factor. The crash revealed multiple weak points in the economy. The first was the fragility of the international economic system of which America had become such an important player. After World War I, Germany assumed heavy debt to the European victors. Responding to the anger of their citizen populations, who had suffered terrible losses in life, property, and money as a result of German aggression, the leaders of England, France, and Italy insisted that Germany make what came to be known as reparations. The American government insisted that their wartime allies, such as the British, French, and Italians, repay the money borrowed to make war. The German government had signed a treaty obliging it to financially compensate damage done to civilians, as well as to pay the full cost of the pensions of the Allied soldiers. The British, French, and Italian governments intended to use some of that income to repay the money they had borrowed from the United States to finance their war efforts.2

The plan made sense politically, but less so economically. John Maynard Keynes, the renowned academic economist and British civil servant, argued that the plan would ultimately be self-defeating, but the optimists believed that in time, the anger in England, France, and Italy that led their governments to insist on an unworkable reparations approach would fade, and that Americans would come to see the wisdom of moving away from their insistence on repayment. The softening of attitudes would enable a comprehensive renegotiation of war debts such that the taxpayers of all the nations involved would share the conflict’s heavy costs more equally. In this vision, Germany, the main loser, would be required to pay less, and the USA, the big financial winner, would pay more by forgiving debts owed to it by Britain, France, and Italy. That step would facilitate the restoration of long-term international economic stability and head off the kind of economic disaster that began in 1929.3 British politicians and treasury officials, with visions of returning their country to its prewar position of dominance in the global economy, favored war debts forgiveness, but they aimed too high, and not just with respect to their hopes for how quickly public resistance to forgiveness might fade. Seeking in vain to make the British pound the world’s benchmark currency once again, the British government had gone back to the gold standard in 1925. But with its wealth depleted after the war, England was unable to fully back the pound with gold, so the move backfired. With an overvalued currency that interfered with world trade, the country was unable to contribute much to an international economic solution.4

Other miscalculations also helped doom hopes for long-term international economic restabilization. Public demands in France, England, and Italy to “make Germany pay” did not fade quickly in the 1920s, nor did the American insistence on repayment from wartime allies. The eventual economic disaster was papered over for a while, thanks to the willingness of the United States, the only major country actually enriched by the war, to lend money to Germany for its reparations payments to the victorious European nations, which they used to make payments on what they owed to the Americans. The basic problem with that approach was that if America’s lending to Germany stopped before war debt forgiveness became politically possible, the global economy would collapse. By the fall of 1929, with so much invested in European economic recovery, America was as much at risk as Europe. When the New York Stock Exchange crashed in October, many banks, facing declining assets, stopped lending to Germany. Its government could no longer make payments to Britain, France, and Italy, which meant they could no longer pay back America.5

The weakened demand in Europe for US exports also contributed to the slump. Before World War I, a generally prosperous Europe had enriched America by buying significant quantities of what we had to sell. Even with American loans, Europe had much less money to spend on those products after the war and was able to purchase even less as the US loan money began to dry up. Making things even worse, the United States continued to stick to an outmoded protectionist trade policy, even after the transformation in our economic relationship with Europe brought on by the war.6

The changes in the US-Europe economic relationship, in which the United States went from being a debtor nation to being a creditor nation, came on rather suddenly, in just a few years. America’s leaders were not prepared for such a dramatic transformation, and the ensuing confusion led to misguided decision-making, such as the stand on war debt repayment and the failure to modernize trade policy to fit the new world order. The ruinous war in Europe had pushed the United States into an international leadership position for which it was not prepared, and which it played badly.7

Several aspects of the American economy having nothing to do with the upheaval of the war in Europe also helped produce the Great Depression. The boom of the 1920s relied too heavily on too few...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982102705
ISBN 13 
9781982102708
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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