Synopsis
Americans have assumed for fifty years that the years after World War II were normal, and that any deviation from that standard is alarming. In fact, the boom period following World War II, the Golden Age, was a historical aberration. Although it had its roots in the American past, much of the prosperity came out of the country's unique position in the world of 1945. Of all the nations on the planet, only the United States emerged unscathed from the three decades of war and revolution that had crippled all the other great industrial powers - Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan. As a result, in 1945 the U.S. reigned supreme.
Then, between the assassination of JFK and the end of the Cod War in 1989, all the factors that had contributed so much to America's self-image went into reverse. American politics went through a period of murderous instability; the federal government was delegitimized; great divisions grew among races, regions, and classes; a wave of immigration transformed the country's ethnic makeup; and the economy slowed down.
Now the major debate among politicians is how to fix America's decline. Elliott puts that debate in perspective by showing that we're in a natural cycle, not an absolute decline, and reminds us that we won't find the solutions in the shiny model of the Golden Age. Those circumstances will never be repeated. Instead, by looking back to the whole of American history, especially to the period before 1914, Elliott offers explanations and some hopeful answers for our current problems. Then, as now, America was a society of immigrants, messy, ragged at the edges, transfixed by cultural wars and suffering serious social cleavages. America was also home to unprecedented pioneering spirit and extraordinary resourcefulness. America today is still characterized by the same sense of community and entrepreneurial vision that enabled us to overcome our problems a hundred years and more ago and become the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world.
Reviews
Elliott?an Englishman living in the U.S. since the early 1970s, who covered Washington for the Economist and is now editor of Newsweek International?asks: Why do Americans whine so much about the state of the nation and its economy? His answer is that by not understanding their recent past, they have created an impossible illusion about the way things should be. Americans, he argues, look at the so-called Golden Age, the decade or so following WWII, as the norm, with the domestic economy booming and the U.S. dominating the world. Elliott maintains, with a decade-by-decade analysis of the years since 1945, that "the messy, fragmented Babel of a place" that America is today "is the way America has usually been." The Golden Age created an educated middle class that was the envy of the world, but it also made redundant the low-skilled, high-paid working class that made such a time possible. Those left behind found scapegoats: blacks in the '70s, foreign investments in America in the '80s, immigrants in the '90s. But Elliott ends on a guardedly optimistic note. He sees a new America taking shape. A period of "traumatic change in family life" is ending. A "vibrant corporate sector and an expanding world economy" can provide a shared prosperity that may once again unite the country. The trick is not to try to do the impossible, to recreate the myth of the '50s. The book is a long editorial, an op-ed piece run wild, but it is snappingly and engagingly written.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The postwar golden age of America, to which conservatives fondly advert, is a historical anomaly that will not likely be repeated: So writes Newsweek International editor Elliott in this well-conceived, thoughtful exercise in political punditry. A Briton, Elliott brings a helpful distance to his analysis of lost glories and current crises. ``Americans whine,'' he says bluntly. ``They live in the most prosperous society that the world has ever seen. . . . And yet they are convinced that their life is miserable.'' We are miserable, he suggests, because we pine for an unrecoverable time, a blip on the screen of history's radar, an era we celebrate for its economic growth, small-town virtues, security, and cultural homogeneity. That moment, which ran from 1945 to 1970, was, Elliott writes, ``a massive freak,'' a false yardstick that fuels a nostalgia verging on heartache. Attuned to such matters, Elliott explores the myth of America as a classless society of equal opportunity, looking at cities like Detroit to show that a huge gulf divides American society: ``For mindboggling contrasts in the quality of life, the Mexican-American border is rivaled by the line that separates the horror of Detroit from a suburb like Grosse Pointe, with its faux chƒteaus and country clubs.'' Yet, Elliott continues, this gulf is an old one, bridged only for a short time by the boom that accompanied the first half of the Cold War--a conflict that is misnamed, Elliott insists, inasmuch as more than 100,000 Americans died on battlefields between 1945 and 1989. The costs of that war and the resulting inflation, he writes persuasively, effectively destroyed the economic boom. Strolling in a leisurely fashion through postwar history, Elliott shows that the reigning bitter class divisions and current furor over international trade and immigration are, in fact, normal conditions in our history. While he stops short of telling Americans to cheer up and shape up, Elliott effectively shows that yearning for our past is unlikely to improve our future. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Elliott, the editor of Newsweek International and former Washington bureau chief of the Economist, speaks to how the breakdown of the nuclear family, job and career instability, unchecked immigration, rampant urban crime, and increasing racial tensions have left most Americans wondering what went wrong. Elliott contends that things are not as bad as they appear; the real problem is the public's insistence that the period following World War II be used as the only measure for what is normal and attainable. He theorizes that the period's high economic growth, stable two-parent families, near-zero rate of immigration, and unquestioning faith in our government were abnormal from the perspective of any other period in U.S. history and unlikely to be repeated. When viewed in a broader historical context, today's most pressing problems mirror past eras in our history. Elliott's work offers a rare, well-thought-out, optimistic view that emphasizes what is right with this country. Recommended for informed lay readers.?Robert J. Favini, Bentley Coll. Lib., Waltham, Mass.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
It has become a national pastime in the U.S. to bemoan our loss of economic dominance, national solidarity, and social peace. Indeed, as Elliott acknowledges in this superb and encouraging work, we do suffer from a series of very real maladies. He also notes, however, that our troubles are anything but new. For most of its history, the U.S. has endured the problems of social fissures, periodic spasms of social dislocation, and the constant turmoil of absorbing and "Americanizing" immigrants. Yet, Elliott shows convincingly that there is a strong case for optimism. The vibrancy of our economy remains the envy of the industrialized world; despite our continuing racial divisions, the gradual incorporation of an oppressed minority into the mainstream has borne some undeniable fruits; and, meanwhile, incoming immigrants continue to show an unquenchable thirst to "become" American, even if that thirst often remains unsatisfied for at least a generation. Elliott doesn't sugarcoat our problems, but he does offer a realistic perspective on where we are and where we can go. Jay Freeman
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