Books in Brief: The Proud Decades

The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-1960, by John Patrick Diggins (Norton, 381 pp., $19.95)

Professor Diggins has addressed himself to an important subject: the period of American military and economic dominance that began with our entry into the Second World War and lasted through the 1950s. This was probably a unique era in our history: we had come through the Great Depression, and in 1945 we emerged from the war virtually all-powerful. American hegemony in the Truman-Eisenhower era played a part in shaping the consciousness of those —myself included—who came of age during Professor Diggins’s “proud decades.” Historically considered, the period had its roots in the Civil War, when the Federal forces built the east-west railroad system necessary to move large numbers of troops and their supplies around the borders of the Confederacy. Prior to the construction of this railroad system, American traffic moved along the north-south river system; St. Louis, on the Mississippi, was the major transit center. After the war, traffic moved east-west, and Chicago replaced St. Louis as the center. The great westward thrust that began in the fifteenth century as Europeans first crossed the Atlantic gathered speed as the Americans sank the Spanish ships at Manila, defeated the Japanese empire, and accepted the Japanese surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This era—one of the great phenomena of world history—finally came to an end in Vietnam. I approached The Proud Decades with enormous anticipation, having written two books about the period myself. Having read it, however, I am unable to imagine the audience intended for this book, which consists entirely of a fast and superficial narration. You can hear the fiveby-six cards marching along: Roosevelt . . . the war . . . Truman . . . the atomic bomb . . . Eisenhower . . . tail fins . . . Elvis Presley . . . television . . . Diggins offers no depth of analysis whatsoever. Nor does he offer any sense of the emotional weather of those years. I suppose the book might be useful to a high-school senior who wanted a kind of road map to the period, on which to mark passages he intended to explore later in serious depth. Much of the narrative writing is accurate, while one winces at Professor Diggins’s attempts to deal with the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, or the work of the abstract expressionists, or that of Sylvia Plath. One also repeatedly stumbles upon bizarre sentences and phrases, of which I offer one collector’s item: “the presumably traitorous Alger Hiss.” If The Proud Decades has any importance at all, it lies in its status as a representative sample of the academic sensibility of the 1980s.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-1960, by John Patrick Diggins (Norton, 381 pp., $19.95)

Professor Diggins has addressed himself to an important subject: the period of American military and economic dominance that began with our entry into the Second World War and lasted through the 1950s. This was probably a unique era in our history: we had come through the Great Depression, and in 1945 we emerged from the war virtually all-powerful. American hegemony in the Truman-Eisenhower era played a part in shaping the consciousness of those —myself included—who came of age during Professor Diggins’s “proud decades.” Historically considered, the period had its roots in the Civil War, when the Federal forces built the east-west railroad system necessary to move large numbers of troops and their supplies around the borders of the Confederacy. Prior to the construction of this railroad system, American traffic moved along the north-south river system; St. Louis, on the Mississippi, was the major transit center. After the war, traffic moved east-west, and Chicago replaced St. Louis as the center. The great westward thrust that began in the fifteenth century as Europeans first crossed the Atlantic gathered speed as the Americans sank the Spanish ships at Manila, defeated the Japanese empire, and accepted the Japanese surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This era—one of the great phenomena of world history—finally came to an end in Vietnam. I approached The Proud Decades with enormous anticipation, having written two books about the period myself. Having read it, however, I am unable to imagine the audience intended for this book, which consists entirely of a fast and superficial narration. You can hear the fiveby-six cards marching along: Roosevelt . . . the war . . . Truman . . . the atomic bomb . . . Eisenhower . . . tail fins . . . Elvis Presley . . . television . . . Diggins offers no depth of analysis whatsoever. Nor does he offer any sense of the emotional weather of those years. I suppose the book might be useful to a high-school senior who wanted a kind of road map to the period, on which to mark passages he intended to explore later in serious depth. Much of the narrative writing is accurate, while one winces at Professor Diggins’s attempts to deal with the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, or the work of the abstract expressionists, or that of Sylvia Plath. One also repeatedly stumbles upon bizarre sentences and phrases, of which I offer one collector’s item: “the presumably traitorous Alger Hiss.” If The Proud Decades has any importance at all, it lies in its status as a representative sample of the academic sensibility of the 1980s.