War and the making of a superpower

“The world must be made safe for democracy.” With these words to Congress on April 2nd 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for the country to enter the first world war. He was also articulating a moral and political justification for the projection of American power abroad that would endure into the 21st century. In foreign policy American liberalism would come to be characterised by a struggle between Wilsonian thinking—interventionist, idealistic—and a more isolationist impulse that countries should mind their own affairs.

In the first world war, Wilson’s intervention proved decisive, as American troops and industrial output tipped a long, bloody stalemate in the Allies’ favour. His idealism had less immediate purchase. The president’s vision for a new world order, embodied in a League of Nations that would provide for collective security and lower trade barriers—collapsed amid political squabbling at home. The League came into being but was a dead letter without America as a member. It would take another, more deadly world war for some of his ideas to be put into practice.

Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric for entering the war provoked a backlash at home from suffragettes, who argued that his commitment to democracy abroad did not extend to half the population at home. In protests outside the White House women called the president “Kaiser Wilson” and burned copies of his speeches. When the protesters were jailed, they went on hunger strike, drawing more national attention.

Wilson finally buckled when it became clear that women were powering the industrial war effort at home while men fought overseas. By 1920 enough states had ratified the 19th amendment to add it to the constitution. (Britain, we hasten to note, had moved earlier, extending the vote to millions of women in 1918.)

In 1915 Carl Laemmle, a German Jewish immigrant, started making moving pictures at Universal City near Los Angeles, where a film business had begun to sprout far from the patent-enforcing thugs of Thomas Edison, a pioneer of motion-picture technology. In the years that followed, Louis B. Mayer and four brothers of the Warner family, likewise Jewish immigrants, set up their own studios. A distinctly American creation was born: Hollywood.

It became the wellspring of arguably America’s greatest liberal strength, its soft power. During the 1920s, 30s and 40s Hollywood projected a glamorous vision of American life in films such as “Our Dancing Daughters”, “It Happened One Night”, “Gone with the Wind” and “The Philadelphia Story”. That many Jews and other immigrants produced and starred in these films only made Hollywood more American still.

In the 1920s Americans reaped the fruits of decades of liberal progress in social mores, technology and institutions. Henry Ford’s introduction of assembly-line production in 1913 had by the 1920s cut the cost of cars and other goods enough to create a broad consumer market. Mass production also expanded office work, much of it taken up by women, who became more independent. Radio, though a European (we would argue British) invention, exploded in America. Advertising flooded the airwaves, marketing an aspirational, affluent way of life. And easy money, thanks to a loose credit policy under the still-new Federal Reserve, made the American dream attainable to millions.

Modern consumer culture was born. Fashion-forward women became flappers. Black musicians in cities ushered in the jazz age. Young couples drove their cheap Model Ts, paid for on instalment loans, for picnics in the countryside. Black-market liquor at speakeasies lubricated all the fun. Surely the good times would roll on for ever, right?

Nothing better captured the Roaring Twenties than the investment craze on Wall Street, which had become the epicentre of American and global prosperity. Regular punters and big firms alike borrowed ever more heavily to speculate and boost returns. But in October 1929 the market crashed, helping tip the world into the Great Depression.

America’s response made matters worse. In 1930 Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff to protect manufacturers, starting a damaging trade war. The Federal Reserve, worried about inflation, tightened the money supply as debts soured, deepening the downturn (and causing deflation instead). President Herbert Hoover, meanwhile, resisted offering federal relief to the needy. The extent of the suffering soon made clear how serious these missteps were. By 1933 one in four American adults was jobless, nearly half of America’s banks had failed and GDP had shrunk by 30%.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic governor of New York (and Teddy’s distant cousin), defeated Hoover in a landslide in November 1932. The new president’s remedy for the Depression was the New Deal in 1933 (followed by the Second New Deal in 1935). The government insured bank deposits, provided relief to the jobless, introduced social security for seniors, strengthened labour protections and put millions of Americans to work building roads, dams and bridges. In his second term Roosevelt added a minimum wage, a 44-hour work week and overtime pay.

The New Deal had plenty of doubters. In 1939 America’s unemployment rate was still 17%. But for most it was a welcome riposte to the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. It also entrenched a new liberal idea: that in hard times the state should intervene more directly in the economy. The economist who gave this intellectual shape was, of course, British. John Maynard Keynes argued that when private demand collapses, governments should spend more to sustain employment and growth. The lasting legacy of the New Deal is Keynesianism—well, that and the tiresome use of “New Deal” branding in modern politics.

Roosevelt left another legacy: a radical expansion of presidential power. He entrenched the idea of leading the government by force of personality. He gave his first message to Congress in person—something Woodrow Wilson had revived, but which now became standard practice. He brought his New Deal legislation to Capitol Hill, cajoling and charming members rather than leaving Congress to set the agenda. And, crucially, he sold his ideas directly to the public through his radio “fireside chats”, enlarging the presidency in the American imagination. In one such broadcast, in July 1933, he highlighted the passage of his New Deal in his first 100 days—a benchmark against which future presidents would be judged.

Inevitably, Roosevelt overreached. When the Supreme Court kept blocking New Deal policies, he threatened to expand it with six new justices. His “court-packing” scheme provoked a backlash. His decisions to run for a third and then a fourth term, breaking a longstanding two-term custom, cemented the perception of an imperial presidency. The 22nd Amendment, ratified six years after his death, limits presidents to two elected terms—or appears to, at least.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” With these Wilsonian words in a fireside chat in December 1940, Roosevelt explained why Americans must do more to help the British in our gallant resistance to Nazi conquest. “We must have more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything,” he said. Roosevelt was arguing against the isolationist mood embodied by the America First Committee, whose most famous advocate was the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.

Roosevelt insisted that aiding Britain offered the best hope of keeping America out of the war. More plausibly, he was buying Winston Churchill time until America could join it. The two leaders laid the foundations for a new “special relationship” between the former colonies and the old mother country. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbour on December 7th 1941—a date Roosevelt said would “live in infamy”—America entered another world war in the name of democracy and liberty.

At the time of Pearl Harbour, many Americans were still mired in the Depression. War gave the country a new purpose. More than 16m Americans—roughly half of young men—served. The war touched almost every family, workplace and town. Factories and shipyards turned out tanks, planes and ships at unprecedented scale; women joined the assembly lines; unemployment vanished as federal spending surged.

On the battlefield, Americans fought across two fronts. In Europe they joined allied forces in large-scale, industrial warfare, from North Africa to Normandy and beyond. In the Pacific they faced brutal, island-by-island combat at places such as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. American fighting relied on overwhelming firepower, complex logistics and impressive co-ordination—hallmarks of the most advanced army the world had yet seen.

America emerged from the war a more confident nation, now the world’s unquestioned superpower. Having endured scarcity, Americans met a global crisis with discipline and collective effort. Those who fought are often remembered as America’s “greatest generation”.

It is one of the ironies of the American experiment that, in wartime, presidents have repeatedly trampled on the liberties they profess to defend. During the first world war Wilson jailed anti-war activists and labour organisers. In 1919 and 1920 his attorney-general, A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted raids to round up thousands of suspected socialists in America’s first “red scare”.

During the second world war, the Roosevelt administration interned around 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them American citizens, on the grounds that they might otherwise engage in espionage or sabotage. Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American, challenged his arrest for refusing to report to the camps. The Supreme Court ruled that the War Department, not judges, should decide whether “military necessity” justified denying due process. Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in 1983 after it emerged that officials had suppressed assessments that Japanese-Americans posed no threat. The government would apologise five years later.

In 1939 Roosevelt received a letter written by Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein warning of the destructive potential of a bomb that harnessed the energy of a nuclear chain reaction. The physicists, who had come to America as refugees, feared that Germany might build such a weapon. Their message spurred Roosevelt to act, ultimately leading to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

From 1943 a team of American, British and émigré scientists laboured at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop what their leader, Robert Oppenheimer, called “the gadget”. In July 1945, two months after Germany’s surrender, they detonated the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.

Horrified by the result, several scientists (including Szilard) petitioned Harry Truman, who had become president upon Roosevelt’s death, not to use the bomb. But America dropped one on Hiroshima on August 6th 1945 and another on Nagasaki three days later. The two bombs killed around 200,000 people by the end of 1945, many from burns and radiation. Japan surrendered on August 15th. We wrote at the time that it was “one more terror which it is better to have on our side, but best not to have at all”.

The 1930s had demonstrated the perils of protectionism and nationalism. What was needed, thought Roosevelt and Churchill, was a new global economic system to ensure prosperity and trade after the war. Unsurprisingly, they intended to be in charge.

In July 1944, at a hotel in Bretton Woods, a mountain village in New Hampshire, negotiators designed a system with America at the heart. Currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar to gold. An International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created. America would be the unquestioned leader of this system. The sun was setting on the British empire.

The champions of multilateralism weren’t done yet. The following April delegates gathered in San Francisco to ratify a charter for the United Nations, with both America and its chief ideological adversary, the Soviet Union, agreeing to participate. A new world order was born.■