In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s [Hardcover]

Professor Michael S. Sherry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 25, 1995

Examining how war has defined modern America, this text argues that America's intense preoccupation with war emerged on the eve of World War II, marking a turning point as important as the Revolution, the end of the frontier, and other watersheds in American history. In the 60 years since the war, says Sherry, militarization has reshaped every facet of American life: its politics, economics, culture, social relations and place in the world. According to Sherry, America's militarization began partly in response to threatening forces and changes abroad, but its internal sources and consequences in the long run proved more telling. War - as threat, necessity, or model of unified action - persistently justified the state's growing size, power and activism. But as national government waged "war on poverty", "war on AIDS" and "war on drugs", it fostered expectations of "victory" that it could not fulfill, aggravating the very distrust of federal authority that leaders sought to overcome and encouraging Americans to conceive of war as something they waged against each other rather than against enemies abroad. The paradigm of war thereby corroded Americans' faith in national government and embittered their conflicts over class, race, gender, religion, and the nation's very meaning. Sherry concludes by speculating on the possibility of ending America's long attachment to war.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sherry (The Rise of American Air Power) argues here that beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. entered into a process of "militarization." WWII and the Cold War reinforced American impulses to develop both an effective state and a prosperous, powerful nation. War and national security became consuming anxieties, providing metaphors and models that shaped major areas of civil life and public policy. The U.S. has not relished conflict, nor has it been dominated by military institutions. War itself remained a shadow for most Americans, even between 1941 and 1945. Yet Americans have waged "war" on poverty, drugs, AIDS and a host of other "enemies" with more energy than consequence. Similarly, U.S. foreign policy from the 1940s to the present has often been capricious and contingent, responding to perceived emergencies rather than concrete national interests. Militarization has been costly: however, disengaging from it is proving a complex process in a world where conflict remains a norm. A highly detailed argument of interest primarily to historians. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

We Americans prefer to view ourselves as an inherently peaceful people; our wars, particularly our overseas wars in this century, were forced upon us by totalitarian or authoritarian regimes. As a byproduct of these conflicts, we were compelled to construct a techno-military complex that placed an immense but necessary burden upon our economy and our daily lives. In his massive and disturbing examination of the growth of American "militarization" since the 1930s, Sherry shatters at least some of these comforting illusions. War created the U.S., war nurtured our continental expansion, and war preserved the union in the cauldron of the Civil War. Sherry convincingly dispels the myth that we immediately shrunk our armed forces after each war since the Mexican War. We were not dragged kicking and screaming into European conflicts in this century; rather, Sherry sees that involvement was the inevitable result of our expanded military power and ambitions. In the post^-World War II and cold war era, the militarization expanded, as much in response to domestic political forces as in response to external threats. Sherry's speculations on the possibilities for a "demilitarized" state in the future are both fascinating and rational. This is a well-written book that both specialists and laypersons can enjoy and appreciate. Jay Freeman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st ptg. edition (October 25, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300061110
• ISBN-13: 978-0300061116
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #488,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Militarization as Metaphor, May 25, 2000

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Steven S. Berizzi - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (Paperback)

Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995)

The preface to Michael Sherry's massive study of the last seven decades of United States history begins with this ominous statement: "Since the late 1930s, Americans have lived under the shadow of war." Sherry addresses many issues in order to prove his point, and it will be impossible to address all of them here. As a result, I will focus on Sherry's main premise, that "militarization" (which he defines as "the process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence") has been the most important purpose of the United States' government since it began preparing for World War II. According to Sherry: "This book emphasizes war as an agent of and rationale for the nation's transformation."

In the broadest sense, what Sherry calls "militarization" is a metaphor for large federal programs, organized hierarchically and managed by massive bureaucracies. Sherry explains that "war" was used by practically every president as figure of speech connoting "federal action and presidential leadership, since war was a supremely national enterprise." For example, Franklin Roosevelt invoked "metaphors of war" during the domestic crisis of the early years of his presidency; Lyndon Johnson "declared `war' on countless problems at home and abroad," and George Bush "deployed the full arsenal of military metaphors when he declared his drug war." In some instances, of course, tough talk of war was not figurative. If the conflict in Korea had escalated into general nuclear war, President Truman wrote in his diary that "Moscow, St. Petersburg, Mukden, Vladivostok, Peking, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Dairen, Odessa, Stalingrad, and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union would be eliminated." According to a phrase in a top-secret American document, large parts of the Soviet Union's urban-industrial infrastructure would have been turned into a "smoking, radiating ruin." In 1965, Secretary of State Dean Rusk urged bombing North Vietnam "as a signal to Hanoi and Peiping that they themselves cannot hope to succeed without a substantial escalation on their part, with all the risks they would have to face." Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay made essentially the same point when he suggested threatening the North Vietnamese that the United States would "bomb them back into the Stone Age." Sherry is absolutely correct that "America's civilian leaders often pursued national security and embraced military values more fervently than military officers." In 1950, for example, Secretary of State Dean Acheson directed Paul Nitze to draft the document which became known as known as "NSC-68," which recommended increasing the defense budget by a factor of nearly three, to $35 billion per year. The influence of policymakers such as Nelson Rockefeller, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, and John McCloy (and Sherry could have added many others) during the early years of the Cold War is well known. Sherry is correct that they "had a common background in eastern elite schools, law firms, corporations, and government," and their "shared outlook" did much to shape the United States' approach to the Cold War. David Halberstam described these men with wicked irony as the "best and the brightest." As early as 1956, as Sherry notes, sociologist C. Wright Mills called attention to this "power elite" running a "permanent war economy." In the mid-1960s, when the policy elite turn against the war, President Johnson fumed: "The establishment bastards have bailed out." Sherry explains the erosion of consensus this way: "When American abundance seemed almost limitless, as in the 1940s and 1950s, militarization had seemed almost painlessly affordable, even economically beneficial, with both guns and butter readily attainable." He proceeds to explain: "America's war in Vietnam violated the tacit bargain which supported the nation's militarization after 1945. Militarization had been tolerated as long as it seemed congruent with affluence and progress at home." The end of the Vietnam War provided a lost opportunity to reverse the forces of militarization, at least in international affairs. According to Sherry, Jimmy Carter's inaugural address, "signaled his determination to break from America's militarized past." Sherry explains: "Carter succeeded better than most modern Presidents at managing the affairs of state so as to keep the nation out of war." According to Sherry, Ronald Reagan had a "well-deserved reputation as a Cold Warrior, and his presidency may be best remembered in the popular imagination for what Sherry describes as having "restored national security as America's supreme priority," but Sherry relies on Garry Wills's incisive comment that, in fact, Reagan's "greatest achievements and his political successes" rested in his "shrewd concentration on domestic policy." Sherry quotes John Newhouse that Reagan had the "good luck" never to have "to confront a foreign policy crisis." George Bush, according to Sherry, "like Nixon, lacked any vision for the nation out of the grooves cut by decades of hot and cold war." Sherry proceeds to explain: "By temperament cautious and by experience a Cold Warrior, Bush was not going to rock the conservative boat by... advancing a new agenda." Indeed, according to Sherry, President Bush's chief of staff John Sununu believed that a "short successful war...would guarantee his reelection." The Gulf War proved to be a superb showcase to "display anew America's superior technology," but, according to Sherry, "the Gulf War served Bush's fortunes badly and his other goals at best partially" because, as Bush himself acknowledged, there was no "definitive end" to the conflict. Sherry concludes: "The Cold War's end did not halt militarization,...but it did destroy the most prominent rationale for militarization."

I am not entirely persuaded by Sherry's assertion that "militarization reshaped every realm of American life - politics and foreign policy, economics and technology, culture and social relations - making America a profoundly different nation." However, Sherry is absolutely correct that militarization was an essential feature of the Cold War arms race and also facilitated the vast extension of presidential leadership, operating through large federal programs, on domestic policy issues. In those respects, the shadow of war had profound effects on the United States.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The cultural entrenchment of American militarization, February 22, 2010

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G. M. "Academic" - See all my reviews

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This review is from: In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (Paperback)

In the Shadow of War: the United States since the 1930s is a deep cultural exploration of the American relationship to militarization. Sherry includes in his study the growth of the American rhetoric of war as an example of the continuity between actual conflicts. In the Shadow of War is an extremely persuasive thesis, especially considering the sheer number of American war movies made in the twentieth century. Sherry builds a provocative, yet convincing argument that American war rhetoric is deeply rooted in the New Deal and was further developed and escalated during the Kennedy administration. America has declared "war" on everything from poverty (in the Johnson administration) to drugs (in the Nixon administration); and the United States has spent over seven billion dollars on the "war on drugs" this year alone. How much more relevant is Sherry's book today with America's war on terrorism? First published in the mid 1990s, In the Shadow of War is a highly prescient work of cultural history that should be read by all American History students.